Day 17: Freestone

For today's prompt, we had to write about the word "hope" as a topic, but we also had to use as many of another list of words randomly throughout the poem.  As the month goes on, I have drifted back to writing about the history of Sonoma County.  Today's poem is about Freestone, the town I live closest too and a place that's been transformed dramatically just in the time that I've known it, but even more so from it's earliest history when three men named James built a sawmill there.  Here is my draft:

Freestone
Hope is a town quarried from easily
worked sandstone.  First, a general store
selling button candy, and dry goods
then a black-aired salon that gathered
like a compass, and then the architect
built the two-story hotel.  This is before
the train drew a silver line between product
and the deliveries made possible by
the Sausalito Ferry.
                                 Years before
when the chorus of frogs still sang from
Salmon Creek, three men named James were
gifted the land by General Vallejo
and they built a sawmill on the creek's stony jaw. 

It's a story that often ends in flame:
three men drunk on land, red-faced, chest to chest
over the names written on the deed to the mill
Instead of fire, one of the James saws the mill
in two, splitting the new wood right down the middle. 

But, even hope, like a field of sleepy-headed snapdragons,
can be grown from this, and keep coming back Spring after Spring after Spring.

Day 16: Valley of the Moon

For today's poem, we were to write off of the word, pilose (which means covered in downy hair). For me, this was a tough prompt.  But, here is what I came up with.

Valley of the Moon

At eye level, the field is pilose, dew-
dappled grass rich with the scent of wet earth.
And the soil here hums electric--since
1920 Sonoma County has been
top ten in agricultural production.
So much available land on which to 
plant crops of hops, grapes, prunes and apples.
Already the apple trees stand their hills
clad in green gowns and vineyards hold back
in the maze of their arms. At night, the air
is fresh and alive with all that desire--
A fox screams her needs into salted air
night after night as we beckon sleep to
bring us back to the time before life throbbed and thrived.