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Best Poems From
JOANNE MONTE
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1.
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The Hurricane
Threatening our tenacity that summer
were the most turbulent vandals of weather.
We drifted, guarding our freedom,
and not thinking the errors weve made
could prove our fragility. But then
a gloss-over in pewter at Hatteras
by that discreet brush of fog preceded a languor
at the marina where boats were sponged up like milk
into the null and void. Out of the southeast,
out of a free will that went undisciplined
all day and night, the wind looted the coastline
with more than one accomplice,
stealing in quick swiping gusts the sheen
of a generations endeavors. The sea in its turmoil,
rode a fast shuttle back and forth
into an outbreak of foam, a sparkling seltzer
of sea water that kept striking somewhere onshore,
housebreaking and plundering. Terror lit up
the eye of the lighthouse that stood on the edge
of familiar warnings, listening
ever so much in those desperate hours.
What does it mean to violate an appeal
for salvation; to surrender in exile
when at last the final scene plays out?
What will it mean to be left without bread,
without the reserve to take back, to take over
given nothing but the astonishing ruins of a landscape
we merely have the means to stare at?
Joanne Monte
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2.
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Letters From Women Given Up For Adoption at Birth
I
This morning I thought how easy
it must have been for you
to have copied your genetic code
in the form of flesh, dated randomly
on that bleak day in December
when the light had the dull luster
of pewter and the blinds had to be drawn.
The day ended my tenancy
in the womb which you otherwise
ripped out of your daily planner,
and being the unwanted, the mistake,
had given up in offering
like the body and blood of Christ.
Every day I struggled
to carry the weight of a lesson,
a refugee of abandonment, reading
through the pages of Catechism books
just before the Crucifixion,
practicing forgiveness.
Now, I must live with the side effects
of an uncommon childhood
like an addiction: a returned identity card,
the genetic code lost in the blood of the unborn―
those blueprints of family history
that build the strong bones of a monument,
revised by the thin scrawl of your signature
on a line that forever divides.
II
If to gaze into that mirror
as though the glass is convex―
if we could first look inward,
then outward―
if we could study profile like the face
of a moon in each of its phases―
would we find our identity?
How much of you would I see
at each angle― full, half, quartered―
that I would not have seen
in the mirror handed me
had its glass not been convex?
What do I know of you
in my arched brow?
In the discharged turmoil
of my eye? In a single gesture?
What do I know
in learning to give up, give back, give away,
that I would not have known
had I been of the same will?
III
I cannot find you
down those stairways
that lead into the deepest catacombs
of family history, buried treasure,
a chest sealed years ago
in the shadow of your footprints;
in the dust of light beams
through the windows in the hall of records.
Nor can I see you in the genetic code
that cannot be deciphered―
those diseases that will torment the blood,
and in the pain that encapsules
our time-released lives―
although
that is where I will find you.
Joanne Monte
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3.
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Displacement
Entering the garden,
I notice the rhododendron,
the platinum pearl, that had displaced
the unwanted vines of bittersweet
tangled around the throat of the honeysuckle,
as though the blossoms
had as much a rightful deed to be rooted
as the dove tree, hanging its branches
over the frame of the border,
not native to the land at all.
But the tree itself, untouched
in its mural of sun and partial shade,
and envied by its resolve to take the brunt
of radical weather, still struggled
in its purpose to remain in its quadrant,
eyed by yew hedges and stones,
its limbs heavy with the flesh of leaves
like the arms of a mother in wartime,
carrying her child on a sinuous path
to the border,
to the tent pitched under ice,
falling on her knees into an arrangement
as though for once she need not move,
as though finding in that reprieve
a sanctuary, or an almost perfect peace.
But if to be spared,
if to move across that border
and find the dove tree astonishingly depleted
but still rooted to its site,
is this, then, the law of continuity?
I look away
from what has been transplanted,
removed and replaced: the sidelong glance
of the rocks, piercing and upsetting
as if the unpolished stones
had been violated, and thrown
by demons into the fire
of all that had been uprooted in its time.
Joanne Monte
Read more: tree poems, weather poems, peace poems, child poems, mother poems, fire poems, sun poems, children poems
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4.
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Eight-fifteen
(a.m.) the city
was split by lightning,
stripped down to bone, and tortured,
its flesh lashed by flames
suddenly
I was beggared,
wearing the rags of loose skin,
hanging like pockets lined with blood.
I could not see
the earth's incinerator,
its volcanic madness, blinded by hair,
burnt darker than matchsticks
and dusted with soot,
but I could feel
the meltdown in my fingers
like soft beeswax, clasping each other
as though desperate lovers
lovers in torment,
gnarled in the arms of war.
I had crawled
from among the dying,
the children curled like fetuses
in their mother's wombs, the unborn;
crawled from under the black rain
of suffering, the ill-smell of survival;
a disfigured hope
seen clutching the red-and-white hibiscus
from my mother's kimono
that became part of my flesh.
(Note: 8: 15 a.m., the time on August 6,1945 that the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.)
Joanne Monte
Read more: mother poems, city poems, war poems, children poems, rain poems, hair poems, red poems, hope poems, child poems
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