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Best Poems From
JOANNE MONTE
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5.
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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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6.
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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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7.
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The Monument
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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8.
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For the Woman in Quandary
You stand on the porch
unaware of the woman you are,
the woman in quandary, the woman
from whom you must step away
and look for through a gray gauntlet of fog
that blinds you
to the direction and the distance,
the earth and its volatile mood swings.
Its almost a certainty
that it will rain wherever you may go;
the rain you dread having to dash into,
dressed as you are in your shiny black boots
and raincoat, toting an umbrella
that you trust to spring up and protect you.
How casually you had chosen it
from among the jungle prints, the arc
of rainbow colors, the royal plaids.
Unlikely that one would better protect you
against the rain darting in at angles,
piercing your bare skin like sharp pine needles,
or the one strong wind you do not expect,
leaving you to wonder just how much exposure
you are risking beneath that fragility.
Joanne Monte
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