Out of place

Written By Barbara Chen

January 5, 2025 - two days before rapidly spreading fires ravaged Pacific Palisades (at the base of the Santa Monica mountains, pictured) and Altadena, Calif. The smile now looks out of place.

This is the Sunday before the fires

that ravaged the Palisades

propelled by the wind

that made my 10th floor office windows 15 miles away⁣⁣⁣

convulse⁣⁣⁣

as we watched the smoke billow black from the hillside⁣⁣⁣

Oh no

This is the Sunday before the shock

The refrain to explain

“Never in my lifetime”

Too fierce to contain

Too large with too little; it charged and it leapt

Leveling homes, and lives as we slept

Now what

This is the someday on which we’ll reflect

When I thought how lucky we were

To return to this “backyard”

To inhale the “ocean air”

To memorize “our” mountains 

To pick and choose among parks and canyons

Where now children must stay inside

Until when

You’ll see my smile looks out of place 

Smokey said

Only you can prevent forest fires

Or can we?

Barbara Chen

Barbara Chen is a nonprofit consultant and writer who has held major communications roles at the NYPD, Bloomberg Philanthropies and Columbia University. She currently co-directs “To Protect, Serve and Understand,” an empathy-through-improvisation training that convenes civilians and police in a multiweek workshop and public performance created by the Brooklyn-based Irondale Ensemble Project.

Formerly an ABC News producer and New York chapter vice president of the national Asian American Journalists Association, Barbara is an alumna of Columbia Business School's Police Management Institute, the Minority Writers Seminar hosted by the Freedom Forum Institute at Vanderbilt University and California State University Fullerton, where she was commencement speaker for the College of Communications in 1999, and inducted into its Alumni Wall of Fame in 2017.

Most of her personal writing and poetry prior to March 2021 lives at imbchen.wordpress.com.

https://iambarbarachen.com
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