Sponsored by an Act of Love You could say National Poetry Month is just an excuse to___fill in the blank___and you’d be right. Officially, it is a celebration of poetry which takes place each April, was introduced in 1996, and is organized by the Academy of American Poets (poets.org) as a way to increase awareness and appreciation of poetry in the United States. Unofficially, The Canyon Chronicle is dedicating space in its April issues, three of them, to the works of local poets who answered a simple call to submit a poem as if it were their season to appear, randomly invited, not curated, people we know and don’t know, side-by-side manifesting life through a poet’s eye. In Memoriam Of poet Ellen Reich, Ann Buxie, wrote of her colleague and friend, “Ellen Reich was, and still is since her passing, a seminal presence in our community of writers and poets. At her death she was serving as the poet laureate of Malibu. When I am low, I hear Her breath encouraging me to write on.� Inn of the Seventh Ray Something has lain there for days before being found —Harry Humes The rain, that hasn’t come for years, still holds out. Tonight’s sky goes from watery blue to cloudless black pearl. We dine under the sycamore. The stream bed, where mule deer once drank, is filled with dry leaves. A deer-eared coyote lurks on the hill. His acorn eyes watch us eat. A shrunken man with a manzanita branch stumbles around a rock, rattling the dead brush under rag-wrapped feet. He holds his bottle like a trout he might have caught in wetter years. The sycamore mottles his face as he watches us eat. He may not hear the sound of the kill and a flurry of bats, disturbed from cracks behind loose bark, finding new places to hang, or see the coyote’s shadow across his plaid shirt. Deep into the landscape he disappears, for a whispering kind of sleep, perhaps lying between exposed roots of another sycamore as though those roots were his mother’s arms. —EllenReich