Weather in San Francisco and Pacifica: 3 Short Poems
1. Unseasonable
Wind howls 'round corners;
button coat, don mittens.
Gray sky lowers,
and blows wet in my face.
Clammy plaster of fog; fangs on the wind.
Chill and damp:
Summer has come
to Pacifica.
Misty, Damp Day
2. Sunrise-Set
I stood on the western cliffs
in the fog.
As I watched,
the sun came out,
and went down.
You have to live in Pacifica
to understand.
Fog Obscures Everything
3. Illusions
Fog sifts into coast,
brilliant glare of sun obscured:
Fog makes sun the moon.
Sun Looks Moon-Like
Backstory to This Poem
From 1976 until 1997, I lived in Pacifica, California. It was where the houses we could afford were, but I detested the weather, especially in the summer months.
Fog was the prevailing theme, morning, noon, and night. Sometimes, living atop a ridge as we did, we were enveloped inside the fog, and visibility was near nil. It caused my younger daughter to realize the answer to her own question of, "What's it like inside a cloud?"
At other times, the fog was low-lying, and driving down from our hilltop toward the beach, we'd be asking, "Okay, who stole the ocean?"
Pacifica is a town on the Pacific Ocean, just south of San Francisco. The two cities share many weather traits, although San Francisco has more micro climates than does Pacifica.
"Unseasonable" was written in April of 1987; "Sunrise-Set" was written in August of the same year; and "Illusions" was penned in May of 1988. All three were revised in May of 2010, and a final minor revision was done in February of 2018.
© 2010 Liz Elias