The office of state Rep. Anthony Bellmon recently presented a House of Representatives citation to Diane Sahms, a poet from Lawndale, for her outstanding literary achievements and contributions to the cultural heritage of Pennsylvania.
The citation notes that Sahms is author of nine poetry collections whose work has appeared in hundreds of literary magazines throughout the United States and abroad. She has contributed to the literary community as the Ryerss Museum and Library’s Poet-in-Residence and as poetry editor of The Fox Chase Review and North of Oxford.
Her poem, Pennsylvania, inspired by a cross-state train journey, captures the state’s natural beauty, industrial heritage and the lives and sacrifices of generations of Pennsylvanians who helped shape its history.
The citation congratulates Sahms on the release of her new poetry collection, – Of an Octopus: An Architectural Awareness of Words.
Sahms visited Bellmon’s new office at 7256 Rising Sun Ave. District Office Director Joe Delmar and constituent services adviser Karla Dominguez presented Sahms with the citation.
Pennsylvania, from Sahms’ second poetry book, Light’s Battered Edge Pittsburgh like a pen that lost its ink. A pervasive loneliness in- vades your propped-up body. Three rivers. Bridges connecting the disconnect. Time to cross over and not look back at who you once were. Bridges crossed; never to be crossed over again. Learn what you can, move forward, parts of you will surely be left behind like the city of steel that has died. Once its mighty furnaces built this nation; now ghosts sing the lost lives of those no longer here. Time has passed; it moves on into the future. Enlightened Emerson says to forget regret, forget memory, the soul must soar toward everlasting, yet China builds steel empires to our forgotten Gods – disturbing as smoke billowing atomic clouds out of nuclear power plants. June’s Alleghenies thick forest green; brown creeks wash our state’s wounded feet; unemployment deep as a dug-out quarry, rough and quick as rapids, stagnant as a tree dead pond; muddy rivers running wild and hungry; and rhythmic as a train rocking its sway from side to side, the hunch back clouds walk the top ridge with slow motion urgency, sun beating on their backs like a chain gang. Philadelphia via rail - Paoli, Lancaster, Elizabethtown, Harrisburg, Lewistown, Huntingdon, Tyrone, Altoona, Johnstown, Latrobe, Greensburg, Pittsburgh. This is the homeland I know, I know none better. Generations of families have lived here in every root reaching foothold, in rich soil of timelessness, of sun. I bless this land. An en- gine pulls its many cars along rails blasted through mountain, wind- ing way through forest, where every shadow has a story, each tree’s testament – its wisdom and leafy green prayers to June-proud rays, prevalence of green; all these waterways like veins running secretly through time’s hidden mountains and valleys, coal cars still packed with black dust. O loved ones, ancestors to us all, how in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh I have sung hard-hearted battle hymns, your bones laid at strangers’ feet. They ran away from your tombs of shadow, clothes soaked in blood, whose sweat sang our state alive, whose raised ashes scattered beat death’s strung-out songs, filling the winds chattering teeth, the buried banging of your deaths’ toll, church bell tongues now silenced into the reading room space of a little room in a grand library, 300 miles from home. I sang your elegies and after reading your life songs, cried as if I had come from each of your funerals. I am ashamed of myself. I cannot bury the ashes of your smoldering, days gone by. How can one drink each night from Lethe and rise the next day forgetting the previous day? I have failed to forget you; turn to rust and ash like the steel mills and the rail yards of Altoona and Johnstown. I release your ashes to the wind of time, but they circle back blinding my eyes in acidic tears; they burn through forgetfulness; all of you rise in front of me and I see and hear you, and I tear my gar- ments from my body, swim in cloudy waters of chlorinated sky where clouds surrender to you, where I see your faces reflected in the lakes, Rivers and mountains, whose silence screams from pinnacles. I swim away from the other side of Lethe, and I wake to your sleeping faces in the shapes of clouds, until they lose their fluffy resemblances and become skeletons, skulls - where I see the blue sky in holes that once were your steel eyes. ••
