Jack’s guest is Hawaii-based poet Melinda Gohn. Immensely active, Melinda Gohn is founder of the Maui-based International Peace Poem Project (1996-present) and coordinates with teachers and students statewide in recognizing young writers in the public schools through sponsoring the annual Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Peace Poetry Contest (1999-present). She writes, “I’m committed to education and poetry and promoting peace in Hawaii…As the founder of the Maui-based International Peace Poem Project, I’ve created the Annual Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Peace Poetry Contest, involving hundreds of students statewide. This year, more than 300 students received certificates from respective island mayors recognizing their peace poetry. My own poetry has been published in small literary anthologies here in Hawaii and in Berkeley, California.” She coordinates the Maui Live Poets Society (1994-present), is publisher of the Maui Live Poetry Anthologies and coordinator of Akaku Maui Public Television Shows featuring Maui Live Poets. On September 18, 2000, she was an invited speaker and participant at the United Nations in New York to observe Millennium Peace Day: she recited poetry before a panel including UN President Harry Holkieri and dignitaries of the UN General Assembly. The invitation was in recognition of her helping to promote nonviolence and of the International Peace Poem Project, which continues.
This is her poem, “Ghost Ranch”:
Bordering our desert Ranch
was a place picked clean
by winds and coyotes
White bones lived there
sun bleached
sticking up in the sand
almost breathing with a life of their own
Every time a horse or a cow
would die
my Bampa would hook up
ropes from the
corpse to the tractor
and haul the carcass
out to the bone yard
A dust cloud following
the lonely jogging mass.
We would run along side
Our bare feet kicking up
Small dust clouds too – racing to see if the vultures
would come.
We never saw them.
We did see the small
Animal tracks everywhere
Down by the dry river bottom
Starred with tumbleweeds
And sagebrush – rabbit tracks
coyote paw prints, sometimes we even
saw sidewinder spirals twirling mysteriously
over the sand dunes
disappearing into the brush
or into a hole
We learned about life out there
from death
The bones our gift
Ghost Ranch our vision
our quest
and eventually – our destiny.