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Best Poems From
JOANNE MONTE
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5.
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The Monument
To return to you
The earth, its flesh scarred for life,
cut open by one nation,
the land for which we fought,
and fought over; the land
for which we shed our blood, and now
itself, a gaping hole of absence,
given to its one and only use.
Remember, here lies your country,
a fragile bone,
a leg it thought it could stand on, broken;
a cast of names, a monument
dedicated on the library lawn
and elsewhere, on the Mall
that space we cannot trespass,
but for the death that outlives you.
Joanne Monte
Read more: remember poems, death poems, life poems
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6.
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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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7.
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River
The river below us:
nitrogen, phosphorous, petrochemicals,
dioxin from the paper mills,
a rich buffet of metals digested
from the mines, and still we remain
oblivious to its symptoms
until a skull-and-crossbones sign warns
of the poisons that run the course
of its slim body, writhing like a patient
on a gurney, admitted for treatment;
warns too, of its offspring
in the waiting room: soft-shell crabs, oysters,
the striped bass, the silk fillet,
and the trout we want to bring home
to the sizzle of butter and garlic
and the fresh herbs in the kitchen.
And suddenly we are left alone
to recover mere memory: the river
we had swung across on ropes
in the dungarees of childhood,
splashing in its shallow gut; the river
over which we fought and killed
and for which we even died
the river we damned.
Joanne Monte
Read more: river poems, childhood poems, memory poems, home poems, alone poems, warning poems, running 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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