Why have just one? For this issue’s “blurb,” we’re featuring five poems by alumni authors
Hongo poses in front of his poem, inscribed on a plaque at the Smith Campus Center
Under The Oaks At Holmes Hall, Overtaken By Rain
By Garrett Hongo ’73
A desert downpour in early spring,
and I’m standing under California oaks,
gazing through rain as the grey sky thunders.
I don’t know why the nightingale sings
to Kubla Khan and not to me, nineteen
and marked by nothing, not even ceremony
or the slash of wind tearing through trees.
I don’t know why Ishmael alone is left
to speak of the sea’s great beast, why
the ground sinks and slides against itself,
why the blue lupines will rise and quilt
through the tawny grasses on the hillsides.
I can’t explain this garment of rain on
my shoulders
or the sour cloth of my poverty unwinding
like a shroud as the giant eucalyptus
strips and sheds its grey parchments of skin
and stands mottled and nude in the
shining rains.
I want something sullen as thundering skies,
thick as earthmilk, brown and sluicing
across the streets, grievous as the flood of waters.
I want unfelt sorrows to give away and
wrought absence
to exchange for the imperfect shelter of
these oaks,
for the froth of green ivy around my feet,
for the sky without gods and the earth
without perplexity.
I want to have something like prayer to pay
or a mission to renounce as a fee
for my innocence under cloud-cover
and these furious nightingales of thunder,
companions of song in this untormented sea
of memory uncrowded with bliss or pain.
From “OCEAN OF CLOUDS: Poems.” Reprinted by permission of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Garrett Hongo. Hongo has published three books of poetry, including “The Perfect Sound: A Memoir in Stereo” (2022).
During Times of Trying to Forgive
By Brenda Hillman ’73
Evening deepens, Jupiter lifts
over Cetus, swaddled
in ribbons of fog. Early stars
retreat into science broth,
headlights on a hill, &
night stays calm. The source
of your hurt is tucked in.
Maybe you can’t forgive
each other yet, & who
can blame you after all
that happened, but still.
You try as a tide tries gray
again. As a friend whose body
had a tumor—whose body
has a tumor—reads in onyx light
till day. How many Mondays
will she have? Is the mystery
counting? She tries, it tries &
the ones who are almost
loved walk through the field.
Inexhaustible seeds are carried
through the field like codes
waiting to be read by air
until the ground is ready.
A Pomona College Magazine exclusive. Copyright © 2025 by Brenda Hillman. Hillman has published more than 10 books of poetry, including In a Few Minutes Before Later (2022). She’s a professor of creative writing at St. Mary’s College in California, where she holds the Olivia Filippi Chair in Poetry.
Moon
By Jodie Hollander ’99
do you ever dream
just as I do,
of having a kind of sister
with you in the sky?
To comb one another’s
milky white surfaces,
or gaze out in awe
at fierce bright stars;
just to be together
amidst the emptiness.
Or are you content
all alone up there,
hovering high above
those darkening trees,
who too must hover
above the world below,
that still somehow sparkles
with artificial lights?
Reprinted with permission from Nocturne by Jodie Hollander. Reprinted by permission of Liverpool University Press. Copyright © 2023 by Jodie Hollander.
Hollander is the author of My Dark Horses (2017) and Nocturne (2023), which was longlisted for the Laurel Prize in nature writing.
Cloud Study
By S. Brook Corfman ’13
I believed long hair alone
would, like rain, wash
my gender away but the rain
rarely cleans, now—it misses
the spot under the tree, moves
the dirt across the street, cannot
reach into my throat or under
the car unless I open for it.
Corfman (they/them) is the author of the poetry collections My Daily Actions, or The Meteorites and Luxury, Blue Lace.
Night
Class
By Bruce Bond ’75
We would only get so far,
given the casualties
buried in each point of view.
This one, this one, this.
To see them was to smell them.
One by one.
Then we read Wilfred Owen,
a lyric
whose anger comes later,
after the specifics.
Take this face,
how the penlight of the medic
pierces the addled eye
just so far.
In each a sky so deep
it swallows up the stars.
Take this gate,
how it chatters like a telegraph key,
and you wake afraid,
knowing so little of your subject.
The siren
in the distance is no stranger
anymore.
It is headed
for your hospital wing,
where it could be a while,
if you are waiting for your son.
We could stare at the wall
together,
as some at altars do,
where the mouths
of nocturnal flowers
open to accept,
as sacrament,
a bee across the tongue.
Poem first appeared in Poetry (July/August 2025) and is reprinted with permission. Bond has authored 37 books and poetry collections and is an Emeritus Professor at the University of North Texas.