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Best Poems From
JOANNE MONTE
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9.
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The Betrayal
Today the drapes, for once,
have been drawn and, at last,
the sun has lit up the pine-dark interiors
of that day you poured me wine at supper,
I need now acknowledge.
I had failed to notice then,
how subtly your fingers had lifted the knife
to skin the lamb,
how unconscionably
you had cut through the leanest part
of the bone, the precious flesh
ripped open and steaming. I had failed to notice
how the tables solid sheet of maple reflected
the sharp glimmer of the blade
and the rapid gutting,
and how, afterward, you devoured the rare meat,
wanting to strip everything clean,
the wine spilling over like blood.
It was your last supper,
the room abandoned
and the drapes drawn, but still clinging
to the one ray of light in the window
as though it could reach into those dark corners
and deflect the desire for vengeance.
Joanne Monte
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10.
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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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11.
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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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12.
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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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