The Coeur d'Alene Poet Laureate program increases awareness of the role that poetry and literature play in the community and creates a record of Coeur d’Alene’s distinctive character.  Along with offering readings and workshops, the Poet Laureate writes poems for the city that are reflective of local landscapes, social situations, or important events.

Water Spirit 

Ancestor or serpent

winged, fish scaled,

fire in the mouth

our dragon

with her petulance

for searing the paint from her forked metal tongue

what wildebeest

loch ness

in our rained in cedar forest

our dragon breaths fire

but lives on water

this creature of every history

ivy green

green envy

backlit by process

made by so many hands

but one story

deep sea blue

and current

blue reflection

blue lightening

and blue flame

dark garnet

the wave of her body

singular

stone

overture

this broadsided

swell

clear eyed

and earnest

how easy to ply toward the sea

ever clearing

in time and water

Our dragon might breathe fire,

but she protects water

spirit of old

serpent that slides in the eventide

cobalt and ruby

rust

midnight

cherry

canary

hyacinth

and blue caramel

skyline

and goldenrod

every shade cut by the artist’s hands

arranged in community

this dragon

measuring

methane, red mouth agape, lava roaring

- Jennifer Passaro, Coeur d’Alene Poet Laureate
                  24 April 2025, Dedication of "Sid" the Green Energy Dragon

Coeur d’Alene

          Windstorm, March 2021

In the deep of our darkened street

the asphalt is heavier than the soft ally wet with dirt.

A whole week of rain loosened the winter thaw

and then the wind

came in gusts, mythological, toppling ponderosas thick as summer.

We had watched from our dining room window

in the late afternoon

the cake cutter still in my hand,

lights blown out above the table

as our favorite crown heavy ponderosa

gave

one quick nod and wiped the face off our neighbor’s house,

siding sluffing off as if exfoliated, their teenage son running out

eyes wide

as two and then three ponderosas

further along 12th

sucked the air up from the ground as they fell.

Night falls with the powerlines,

and our house on this powerless street

looks bright in its old blue dress.

Next door the uplighting is clapped out

the flickering streetlight finally quiet,

the electric illusion of each house spooned back towards the earth.

When I was little, I would visit my grandparents

in the Wood River Valley

where the dark sky bent

to kiss the ground

in volumes.

My grandparents lived next to the only highway

shuttling north. At night, high beams trafficked the wall,

arching out the darkness in a rhythm that felt like longing.

Home, I walk a circle from my house

the darkness has a smell, near buds and branching

where its depth continues up from the water,

not just hugging the periphery,

but everywhere iron dented, exposed

I wade the lint thick night to the little jog where the lady who loves roses lives

the heaviness sways and I stop

inches from a downed power line, the pole severed by a toppled birch.

Into the airplane engineer’s lawn,

I skip around the down line and linger,

the houses glow

with candlelight.

Not knowing the tiny fist of my son grows in my belly,

feeling only, eagerly alone, but not apart

deer trail underfoot under layers of road

my neighbors’ houses somehow less removed in this darkness.

Almost none of us were born here, but it feels as though we all belong

cerebral birds shuffling the horizon’s pupil.

Some came in the 70’s & 80’s to a place where single mothers could afford a house,

children roaming the unbuildable rocky outcroppings, the lumber yard edges

and then later they came for political safety

or an idea of what it meant to be at home in a political ideology.

Another wave of mothers during the pandemic

and retirees for a freedom they could articulate,

even if it wasn’t written here.

This place of heart and awl,

threading itself through

Migration the pattern of making

and remaking a home.

One neighbor

he knows everyone and everyone him,

born here in the house his grandfather built when the Coeur d’Alene still camped

beneath the tall ponderosas,

their roots deep without asphalt to pave them over,

dark night everywhere still.

In this darkness I don’t think about who someone voted for

only that they, like me, need warmth this March night and they’ve found it here,

even in extraordinary circumstances.

None of us are the center of the narrative of this place,

but an experience passing through.

Tim comes through our yard occasionally with his metal detector.

He doesn’t find much, a rusted mason jar lid still threaded

to the thick broken neck that once held something canned in this kitchen

and what had dropped in a move or thrown at a husband back too late from the bars,

when the working class was of clear extraction

before this working class of tourism, an extraction of the self

and what it means to experience place

ghost in the throat, when our rental sells, we pour over the map online,

12 long term rentals,

77 short term ones in the blocks that we call home.

Late one night I reach out to one and cry

for my desire to live in this place we are selling to visitors.

He responds in equal cry

that I should have read the writing on the wall.

This is a tourism economy, and I think of the room

in my grandparent’s home in the most expensive valley in the state,

the light scooting across the wall in a way that will always make me safe

and I think of the camp that used to unroll beneath the house where I sleep now

and the pattern we have of displacing others

and the role of this council not merely to enact thoughtful legislation

but to govern in a way that will ensure none of us are disposable to the places we call home.

I think about this room and the stories that happen here,

and walking in that dark, the night asks

When the lights come back on what will we say was here before and what will be after?

                 - Jennifer Passaro, Coeur d’Alene Poet Laureate
                  15 April 2025, City Council Meeting

Early October

This illuminated day, illuminated

leaf you choose from the pile

a scattering of

light green and dark,

corn-yellow, lantern, blood-red, but this

            golden one, summer sun and winter candle

held in your hand. Elliptic as the curve of the lake

touching the sand.

The season has sung the beach back

quiet. Only chickadees toddle,

trying all the forgotten berries.

A flicker stills in a snag

and then drops, old swoop, cloud-heavy,

its white pressed back something other. All the draws I’ve walked alone

lit by this overwintering bird and the friend that taught me to sing them.

A city can be a friend. Its peripheries endure us.

The sun slides across the half surface of each thing begging for bounce.

Sometimes I see this thin old woman walking on Government Way,

some days she is all sadness, a crumpled glove, but yesterday she strolled,

a biscuit in her hand,

the sun washing her face,

her grey hair holding every warmth

the entire city her home.

We return, my son and I, to the leaves piled in their little gully

damp divide, sidewalk, cut grass.

We pocket the most perfect. These will be suncatchers

in the window when the dark comes.

These will be illuminated – the way you say the word, so many small syllables

rounding in your toddler mouth –

our home catching.

                                    - Jennifer Passaro, Coeur d’Alene Poet Laureate
                                      9 October 2024, 28th Mayor's Awards in the Arts

Jennifer Passaro is a poet, nonfiction writer, and stay-at-home mom. Born in Idaho’s Wood River Valley, she has spent much of her life in what Moscow writer Mary Clearman Blew coined the “roughhewn circle,” a cultural and geographic centering that encompasses Idaho, western Montana, and Eastern Washington.  She earned her Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Montana in 2011, with an emphasis in creative writing, particularly poetry and fiction from the western United States and Native American literature and cultural studies. Her experiences include working on trail crews in the Bob Marshall Wilderness in Montana and out of the Fernan Ranger District on the Idaho Panhandle National Forest. She worked as a reporter for the Coeur d’Alene Press covering Kootenai County and has contributed to the Sandpoint Reader, the Trestle Creek Review, and Opt West Literary Magazine, among other publications. Most recently, Jennifer has been a writing instructor at Emerge, where she led poetry workshops and performed at events like Lit Crawl CDA. Jennifer made Coeur d’Alene her home in 2018 and currently resides in the Sanders Beach neighborhood with her husband, their son, and their two old dogs.