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Best Poems From
JOANNE MONTE
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5.
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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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6.
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At a Sidewalk Cafe
An ordinary morning―
awakening to nothing but daylight
prodding through the eggshell-tinted blinds
and the warm quilts to be tossed back
in which sleepers all over the city
groan, burying themselves deeper
into the sheets of oblivion.
Downstairs, the sidewalk cafι beckons
with the daily choices to be made: trays
of napoleons, parfait glasses filled
with strawberry cream, and the two-sided list
of coffees that patrons pour over
in their passion: the golden warmth of hazelnut,
the richness of Colombian,
the full-bodied Java―
even that everyday flirtation with espresso
and its bittersweet aftertaste,
an attraction so innocuous it seems,
that I wonder what quirks of fate
endear us to our choices in the end―
however invariable the consequences.
Joanne Monte
Read more: city poems, passion poems, fate poems
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7.
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The Dark Secret Borne
in a village
soldiers have hunted,
borne behind doors
that have been kicked open
to drain the blood and flesh
of its nutrients, its life,
has left me
in this home of captive breeding,
stripped in the buffer zone of womanhood.
But thinking
that on that day,
I could have also died by a bullet,
I crawled and crawled
away from that house
to the foot of a cypress,
as desperate as one was,
to be left for dead.
____________________
It's borne in that room
where one woman lies
in a marshland of linens, and bedsprings
that poke through the mattress
like stalks of cattail;
borne in a runoff
of placenta and amniotic fluid,
tainting her own milk and blood.
But on that day,
she had taken the infant
from her womb, brushed his head
with fingers as light as feathers,
and snapped it back
like the cattail dies back in autumn
with thousands of seeds
blown to the wind
thousands more
than deemed too many.
Joanne Monte
Read more: autumn poems, woman poems, house poems, home poems, wind poems, dark poems, light poems, soldier poems, hunting poems, women poems
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8.
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The Light By Its Creation
from the beginning,
was meant to douse the darkness
as it did then in that year;
to sparkle the snowflake
that caught the fringe
of a child's eyelash in the Urals of winter
as it backlit
the blue in his mother's tears;
meant to splash
into the bucket of reindeer milk
as it splashed on the shoulders of peasants
toiling in the fields of revolution
that they, themselves, had plowed;
to creep without reservation
into the blacksmith's shop in Bukhara,
past old city walls;
meant to warm
the bread at supper, the bowl
of sunflower seeds; the sleeping children
in their utopia, snug in blankets
loomed with parrot and peacock feathers
and red squares. But this
had been a dream of light,
and by its creation,
meant to reveal what had been done
in darkness behind the barbed wire,
sharpened by secrets;
the brine pits where men were beaten
into their labor, ankle-deep in mire;
their hands stung by salt water
and the pull of cabbages;
meant to glisten
the sweat on their backs,
and in the beards of Old Believers
wishing to go back before the slaughter,
the forced starvation, the mass graves;
before the light
was meant to pour down the throat
of the iris, choking on its stalk;
before it poured across the canvas
on which Goya painted Saturn
Devouring His Children.
Joanne Monte
Read more: children poems, city poems, winter poems, child poems, light poems, mother poems, red poems, water poems, dream poems, shopping poems, sleep poems
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