1 Poem by Marian Romani

Asilomar Songs 

Old ocean hushes hisses, 

its steady breath the rush 

beneath the rise and fall 

of chanting waves, 

of water melodies’ 

perpetual ageless song. 

Faraway waves exhale 

slow-mounting curves, 

near ripples murmur, 

spill on glistening rock, 

linger in the tidepools, 

still, the far curls rise relentless 

to new swells, roll azure 

to white foam, shimmer, 

crash in thunder on still cliffs, 

sweep anew the silent sands. 

Soaring gulls’ piercing calls 

color, syncopate the rhythms, 

and sandy feet step in to dance 

— step sink sift step — 

as human breath deepens, 

flows with the motion of sea. 

Bionote 

Marina Romani has written poetry off and on during much of her adult life, but she began to give real time to her writing only after she retired, now about a decade ago. In those last ten years her poems have appeared in growing numbers in print and on-line literary magazines, among them Homestead Review, Porter Gulch Review, Monterey Poetry Review , and a previous issue of Poetry Pacific. Recently, Marina completed a poem-and-prose memoir of her early childhood in wartime and civil-war China, Child Interwoven: A Russian Girlhood in 1940s Shanghai, which she hopes to bring out in book form in coming months.