It’s Pronounced Yah-hots
Join me here on top of Cape Perpetua.
If we have patience, these clouds will relent.
Here, on fresh moss among sword ferns and maidenhair
spread through a forest of shore pines and spruce, let’s listen
to the ocean surge and hiss, watch foam curl over black lava rock
through the glisten of greens and grays.
See the group of small buildings
that seem to have washed in
like a rope of seaweed
or chunks of glass?
Yachats, gem of the Oregon coast.
So says a license plate holder in one of the gift shops.
Logging’s gone under, motels hang on, restaurants come and go
with the tides.
I came and went too.
But I’ve kept two friends
one beach north in a slightly longer town.
Like Yachats, it holds routine tsunami drills.
My friends are very old. Each lives alone. These two remain
pledged to the soft salty mist that caresses their cheeks
the way nuns persist through the loss of many sisters.
Marjorie Power’s newest poetry collection, Oncoming Halos, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books. Her Seven Parts Woman appeared in 2016 from WordTech Editions where you may find sample poems and blurbs. Power lives with her husband in Denver, Colorado after many years in the Northwest.