Sarita Brown

Sarita Brown Poems

Sarita Brown Biography

Sarita Brown was born to teenage parents in the 50's. Her maternal grandparents were from Oklahoma and migrated to California during the depression. She grew up in a small beach community in Southern California during the 60's and 70's, an idyllic experience she laughingly refers to as a cross between the Wonder Years and That 70's Show. Her mother ran a small cafe on the end of the pier and she grew up on the beach. She was the first woman in her family to graduate from high school, the first to graduate from college and the first to have her first child out of her teens. She says that her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother are her heroes for their tireless devotion to the goodness of life and their faith. Sarita started writing about the same time she started singing. The cadence of song, even in her free verse work mark her poetry. She has lived in California, Oregon, Texas, London, Geneva, Scotland and has recently made her home in Arequipa Peru, where she studies Spanish, works with kids and writes obsessively. She has a degree in theology of religion and has worked with people with learning disabilities in the arts. She paints when she runs out of words. She was married for 22 years to the writer, S.L.Smedley, and has a son, Lucas, a counselor for troubled teens who lives in Texas and a daughter, Zoe, a micro-biologist who lives in San Diego. They do her proud.)

The Best Poem Of Sarita Brown

Conversation By A Dusty Highway

God sits next to me on the busy highway
and says nothing.

we have been traveling for months now and he is getting
edgey.
i told him that the last turn was doubtful, but you know
god, he never listens to anyone.

that is not fair.
he listens to me.

I tell him that the broken heart is not
a tree or a brick, but a wheel
and is too bent for its normal use
i can put it on a wall,
use it for decoration, try to plant something
in it that will grow.

He says, nice try, but that's not what
hearts are for, mere display.
they are not pictures or vases or easels
or sculpture
they are alive and they want more.

he assures me that there is a healing mechanism that will
turn this last break, this toughest one so far
into a fiber so strong
it won't break that same way again.

but that means, i murmur,
that it won't love that way again either.

he turns away from me to watch
the double deckered trucks flying down the road.

'love is the combination of all the people
you have ever loved and every person that
has ever loved anyone or anything
and each person
and each love
and each strand is a fiber of Love
and the strands break and new strands come.
its painful and real.
its hard and lovely.

its not damage, its organic and it will
it will
it will
be ok.

How do you know, i ask him
how can i be sure?

he looks at me with the laser
light of all his truth
and i cringe a bit. he needs to learn
to tone that thing down.

It's what i do.'

we are silent.

have You ever loved and lost?
I ask.

the gravel spits up at us from the
roadside and makes divots in his cheek

'Every day'.
he says.

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