Cover with photo by Lloyd Hitt
ISBN 978-0-9819693-5-0 , 116 pages.
Moonrise Press is pleased to announce that the next poetry book in our Women Writers series will be by Marlene Hitt, the first Poet Laureate of Sunland-Tujunga, former Museum Director at the Bolton Hall Museum, organizer of readings, community events, editor and author. The book includes 73 poems divided into sections on: Children, Marriages, Portraits, Neighbors, Seasons, Small Things, Passages, and Farewells. The title captures the poet's fascination with the flow of time, as relentless and powerful as drops of water that can shape rocks and move mountains.
Marlene Hitt
Marlene Hitt is a Los Angeles poet, writer and retired educator with local history as an avocation. She has served for many years as Archivist, Museum Director and Historian at the Bolton Hall Museum in Tujunga. She is a native Californian and a graduate of Occidental College. She also studied at CSUN, USC, UCLA, Glendale College and Trinity College in Ireland. As a member of the Chupa Rosa Writers of Sunland for nearly 30 years, she has worked with this small group of poets from whom has sprung readings at the local library, the Poet Laureate Program of Sunland-Tujunga, and the currently popular Village Poets.
Marlene Hitt, Photo by Lloyd Hitt
Her poetry received several first place prizes in annual competitions of the Women’s Club, San Fernando Valley, and many awards from the John Steven McGroarty Chapter of the California Chaparral Poets. Her work appeared in Psychopoetica (UK), Chupa Rosa Diaries of the Chupa Rosa Writers, Sunland (2001-2003), Glendale College’s Eclipse anthologies, two Moonrise Press anthologies, Chopin With Cherries (2010) and Meditations on Divine Names (2012), and Sometimes in the Open, a collection of verse by California Poets Laureate. She published Sad with Cinnamon, Mint Leaves, and Bent Grass (all in 2001), as well as Riddle in the Rain with Dorothy Skiles, and a stack of chapbooks for friends and family.
Ms. Hitt, elected Woman of Achievement for year 2001, served a Poet Laureate of Sunland-Tujunga in 1999-2001, at the turn of the century. She has published several books on local history, including Sunland-Tujunga From Village to City (Arcadia, 2000, 2005) based on columns written for the Foothill Leader, Glendale News Press, North Valley Reporter, Sentinel, and Voice of the Village newspapers since 1998. Over the years, she taught in elementary school, worked in a pharmacy, chaired committees, tap-danced, and played English handbells, autoharp and ukulele. She dedicates her successes to her husband, Lloyd, her children and grandchildren, her biggest fans.
About this Book
Clocks and Water Drops is a book of treasured gifts packed in
memories and reflections as tasty as homemade bread, fanciful as a rose petal
salad and healing as warm camphor oil on a child's
skin. Marlene Hitts’ astute and thoughtful voice paints a world as
gentle as lamb’s wool and precious as a girl’s first pony. Open this cedar
chest of poems, don its knitted socks and prepare to chase the moon through
love and time.
~ Jack Cooper
Author, Across
My Silence
Marlene
Hitt is an attentive poet, an inspired poet. She listens to the sounds of the
past, disappearing from our electrified, virtually connected lives: the “plodding of beetles,” the ticking of the
grandfather clock, the tapping of rain on a window sill. She watches shifting hues in the sky and the mesmerized
faces of children “glued” to their TVs; she sees how the children still brighten
at the sight of a Christmas tree. Marlene
shows her readers what a life well lived could be; she makes poems from family
stories, community celebrations, and discoveries in a back alley. She portrays
her grandparents and her children, yet she does not forget her neighbors, the
homeless, the lost… Clocks and Water
Drops, her first full-length poetry collection, is a gift of “small things”
– a gift of remembrance and affection, a whimsical and wise offering of
carefully calibrated images and reflections.
We are thankful for the talent of Marlene Hitt, the first Poet Laureate
of Sunland-Tujunga, a historian of local communities, and a treasure of poetry
in the Foothills.
~ Maja
Trochimczyk, Ph.D.
President,
Moonrise Press
California Poppy. Photo by Maja Trochimczyk
I Can Hear the Plodding of Beetles
I
have heard of silence
deep
enough to hurt the ear,
of
quiet strong enough to know
the
sound of blood rushing
through
one’s own body.
There
was once in this valley
quiet
enough
to
made public a whisper.
Murmured
conversation
pushed
away miles with silence.
At
night, owl called. Coyote
sang
her blessing over a meal.
From
a dusty trail, once,
hooves
made rhythm
for
a wagon’s wheels,
a
duet that entertained mid day.
The
old parson sang
“Lord,
I’m Comin’ Home”
and
the song was heard
clear
to the hills and beyond.
The
men, tired, dusty, hot
slept
outside on their cots.
Their
lullabies-- the cough of a friend
from
across the valley, a quiet song
sung
in a tent, a murmur..
Years
have passed. Since then,
new
sounds fill the air.
Jays
still squabble,
small
creatures scurry
breaking
branches,
avalanching
piles of pebbles.
But
now, so many years present,
is
a deafness from new noise.
Hammers
tap duets with hand saw,
A
cement truck
pounds
on the ready soil,
covering the death cry
of
the horned spine flower.
Roaring,
as relentless as waterfall,
cascades
from the freeway.
Big-rigs
speed. Families rush,
the
weary hurry to quieter shores.
Over
a rocky place
below
the asphalt of the 210
empty
flatbeds thump,
bounce
over that stubborn place
where
tough globs of granite
lay
miles deep
and
three inches too high.
This
morning, inside the loudness,
I
see a cat’s mouth
meowing
a silent cry
that
forms from my memory.
Heard
only in my mind
is
the call of mourning dove
and
the sigh of breeze.
In
my thoughts
I
can hear the plodding of beetles.
(c) by Marlene Hitt
(c) by Marlene Hitt
Italian Pine in Sunland Tujunga, Photo by Maja Trochimczyk
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