Only with expiation and forgiveness of mutual sins, Can we change ourselves, and maybe others, too.
The beginning
Flock of roaming sheep,
lost, wasted in hunger of wolves
are left without a shepherd,
who laying under the shade of centenary wood,
dreams of the beginning.
The sheep lost,
the shepherd wakes up
looking around toward the horizon!
Notices that
He is left alone
after his doze
on a summer day.
Mask Time
We wear masks to shut-up our mouths!
Our lips remain invisible under them,
Our teeth are not visible, too,
Even the smile remains not a hidden secret,
The bad smell, too,
And the words we speak are not well articulated, with no regret.
We do wear the masks to prevent the virus from entering in us,
And vice versa, not letting go out from ourselves.
We do wear a mask over our face-mask,
The lipstick in women’s lips remains unseen,
Same with botox in their swelled lips,
Can’t feel even the breath.
We wear original mask to cover the fakeness in this pandemic time,
we follow the advice from the responsible institutions
How to care about ourselves and the other,
Although, most of us do not follow it.
We do wear masks while we walk in the streets and
When we see a familiar face,
We take off the mask to greet them, as sign of respect!
Home
My home is
where I meet my silence,
My breath,
My soul,
My fragility.
At home
I have my memories,
My thoughts,
My life.
At home
I have my happiness,
I have myself,
I have the hope,
I have the future.
At home
I have my moments,
The time,
The space.
At home
I have my warmth,
I have the fire,
I have the ash,
I have the light.
At home
I have my destiny,
My wishes,
My risks.
At home
I have my sky,
I have my sun,
I have my moon,
I have my stars.
At home, my home
I have the access,
I have the love,
I have the harmony,
I have eternity.
At home, my home.
Think. Do not cut the funding
Rapidly warming Earth cries,
droughts, conflicts, floodings rise.
Pastoralists compete, struggle, worry,
as grazing lands gradually shrink.
Think, do not cut the funding.
Depending on subsistence farming
humans fight for life in camps.
Searching for food each day, as
plants trees crops slowly ... die
Think, do not cut the funding.
Pandemic lockdown proving seismic,
adaptation, adaptation, is the call,
O, please do not cut the funding.
Help All! Do not cut the funding.
a smell of cows
stone walls in ruin
scattered wood
a contrary face—
that sliding roof
scrubbed by winter;
unneeded, unheeded,
difficult and drafty,
as reality closes in
refreshing the land,
Teeny’s barn
all but fallen, yet,
holding to stubbornness
in its determination
for Wilson (Teeny) Luce
The First Pilgrim
Shadows that leave no visible mark
wait as I ripple the air.
I’m becoming the art finding its way.
Hidden beneath March’s dead leaves;
a phantasm of possibilities.
My new feathery green
nudges a promising landscape,
there, on its way to something else.
I’m going to sink into oblivion,
obviously linking this planet
we’re living on to contagion
so many see raging in our lives.
The planet eyes a sad reprise
in an extinction surprise designed
to rid it of us—such a fuss to save
the ducks, dolphins, and newts.
Bring luck to what our environs once
meant, turning now to the battle cry:
Arise quills, venoms, and ills! Erase
the worldwide virus that is us!
I gather stones from ocean, sea, lake, river, stream, and the dry desert wadi; to protect my straw life from the storm winds of time they line the walls, shelves, walks, and a small corner rock garden. Snow buries them in winter, the outer ones, and the inner turn invisible beneath plaster and book dust as these stories and poems renovate the narrative, revise my living space into something that might hold up to erasures of climate, and my life into—something. Long after my DNA strands become a statistical probability chancing in some descendants’ groins; long after the house falls to dust, the garden to weeds, the shores of the oceans and seas recede, advance, the lakes come and go, the rivers dry and flood, the wadi erodes to flatlands; long after all of this; a few stones out of place here in a row, there in a pile, might attract some little notice, a bit of curiosity. This flint tool from Baaka. This agate from Superior. Amethyst from Ontario. Lava from Hawaii. Mica from Pennsylvania. Polished smooth granite. In some way we will remember. Where did such stones come from? When? How did they end up here? Why? What story do they tell? Who gathered them in? And who after all will stop to notice; in what climate will these stones be uncovered? Perhaps by a robotic rover returned from Mars…
A segment from Perseverance’s Mastcam-Z First High-Resolution Panorama March 02, 2021 — Cropped and adjusted in Adobe® Photoshop® by Michael Dickel Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS
When the spirit rises more
More of the human defects are seen
And everywhere there is darkness,
Languid malice that provides
In so-called cinematic language
From the real the assembly transforms
The scenery in a fantastic atmosphere
In fact what passes the norm
Silenced songs of yesteryear
Blazing epiphanies dazzled
They are in dementia right now
The voracious song of the hurt souls
Afternoon shakes or gesture unable
In the clear waters that cry
Become a quick guy
The calendas that always were.
11th Hour
The unspeakable is about to be written
Out on the street that is destined for us
Whenever something wants to die
An Intestine Fever Falls In Us
They are psychosomatic lenses
That on the whole line make career
In extragalactic travels
Everything is good in the voice of a mourner
And we lunatically prefigure
The judgment of that which
For only what we have achieved
Makes us live in axiom
From the hypothetical declared
The logos is pronounced
Act like harassed fire
By the voice of resignation.
21st Hour
Shine the mind in diaspora
The constant quibbling
That opens Pandora's box
And makes her belligerent
In heavenly domains
Travel by creating planispheres
Between stars and portals
Leave the seed of mysteries
Myriad kaleidoscopes
Throb in the substrate
By the Pleiades
Seeking the Desiderate
In paranormal hallucinations
Of body and soul
Supernormal Experiences
Horizons without a soul?
the little crawfish that nipped my finger
has the coolest job on earth
rolling clods of wet humus
into moist balls
to build a chimney & bring
rich dark earth to the surface
its chimney had closed somehow, so
I turned the tower over with my foot
thinking I did him a favor
opening an air duct
a cardinal mistake—
this tiny crawfish emerged
from the thick gray mud
claws raised toward me
flexing & threatening
so I slipped a finger beneath it
to lift it back into its hole
the mudbug pinched me hard
a little fold of skin
bunched up between the pincers, the mudbug
not half my thumb’s length
squeezed it tight
today that hole was plugged again
from the inside
when the weather’s warm & dry
the crawfish rolls another ball
capstone to close the chimney
and hold moisture in
until late winter rain
or a much too early spring
Haiku 2020
“may we all have better vision in 2020”
picked off my hand
the ant that just bit me
—I might have killed it—
3-8-2020
two bumblebees buzzing
belly to buttonhole
zizz over my head
3-22-2020
turning over
the garden shovel and--
out drops half a worm
3-23-2020
second night of quarantine
—the smell
of someone else’s barbecue
3-24-2020
carpenter bees on
corner of the garage next door
eating the building
3-25-2020
The clouds are about
to drop from the sky
Aw! They crushed the moon!
3-29-2020
a curtain over
the window keeps lightning
from coming in
4-19-2020
epigram“it's either in this world
or never”
waiting for the wind
to raise a ruckus
tornado warnings again
4-19-2020
it was just a handful of rain
flung out of a cloud onto
the sidewalk
5-16-2020
Dennis Formento promises never to write a bio longer than the average poem. He lives in Slidell, Louisiana, Mississippi Bioregion, USA. St. Tammany Parish co-ordinator of 100,000 Poets for Change. Author of Spirit Vessels, Cineplex, Looking for An Out Place. Poem “Amarcord,” appeared in English and Italian, in Americans and Others: International Poetry Anthology, Camion Press, 2nd ed., 2020. Poem, “the floe of ice,” performed with Simone Bottasso on organetto, is on Youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlXNe9lKkxg
if I have to sleep, I’ll sleep, but the moon isn’t there anymore
what you see is a pale reflection, the moon
is self-generated light
what I mean when I say self-generated light
I mean a solar sail like a giant curtain
dragged behind the moon & keeping it
in perfect orbit above the earth’s surface
the real moon is gone, taken apart
by scientists from NASA, EU and the KGB
“the moon”
is just a thin metal disk powered by that solar sail
some people think
the moon itself is the sail but
I think the sail is deployed behind the moon
trapping light from the sun, powering the engine
that keeps it in orbit
you can see it if you telescope real close
astronauts know this—high-flying pilots know this—
just a few lousy miles across, the thin metal plate reflects the sun’s light
and the earth’s shadow just the way the moon did
well some people think it’s thin, durable mirror
but I think it’s metal—highly polished metal that resists
the pings and arrows and chips you’d normally get
from junk up there at the front door of space—
some people say it’s the frontier, but I say it’s the front door of space
The real moon is gone Scientists took it away
and left a lot of junk behind
Imagine all the lovers without a moon—
the bad poets—Jungian psychologists—I call ‘em
“spychologists”— basing their poems and prognoses on nothing
but a thin metal plate hovering above the earth
Oh, the tides have nothing to do with the moon
they never did, the tides are created by the sun
Everybody born with their moon in Aries through Pisces
has to find another planet for their sign
Your lives are meaningless NASA and the Russians
have stripped the moon of meaning
and replaced it with a thin solar sheet
The moon people
have nothing to believe in
The President knows this in his Oval Office
The Oval Office is a symbol of the moon!
He’s fighting to bring the moon back
but he can’t tell you, no one would believe him
and he’s got to keep his credibility intact
He knows why women are going crazy
their ovaries so accustomed to the moon’s
spiritual pull— they have evolved for millennia to respond to it—
Remember Jesus has a house on Mars—but NASA
doesn’t want you to know—
there are pictures Jesus would have to be eighteen feet tall
to be seen in this resolution some people say eighteen I think that’s impossible
but he’s the son of God so you never know
The scientists don’t know
The Moon the wolves howl at, the one we see
dipping into the Western sky—our Western sky
that belongs to us—remember the flag that was planted there?
It’s in a museum in Russia with Lenin’s tomb—
the Russians must hand over the moon—
a thin sheet of glass—some people say
—but I say it’s metal
sometimes visible during the day
reflecting the sun’s light
and the earth’s shadow in a perfect imitation of the real
psychological moon. The one in our dreams has been stolen
and the scientists have stolen our dreams.
Only the President and his queue
of anonymous advisors know this.
Dennis Formento promises never to write a bio longer than the average poem. He lives in Slidell, Louisiana, Mississippi Bioregion, USA. St. Tammany Parish co-ordinator of 100,000 Poets for Change. Author of Spirit Vessels, Cineplex, Looking for An Out Place. Poem “Amarcord,” appeared in English and Italian, in Americans and Others: International Poetry Anthology, Camion Press, 2nd ed., 2020. Poem, “the floe of ice,” performed with Simone Bottasso on organetto, is on Youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlXNe9lKkxg
I’m letting the garden be wild,
I think,
stop mowing the lawn
to benefit bee,
butterfly, spider—
never air-puddling
gnats, they agitate my sky.
I’m letting the wild be, think garden
hedges hanging loose,
holly thickening,
sparrow gossip halls,
goldfinch clown acts,
and no fly zones
for all the shitty grey pigeons.
I wild, I think I’ll garden,
bindweed no,
pluck it out!
slash bramble,
all interlopers can wait
to be rotten beneath the
ash I allow to remain.
I’m garden:
Wild!
send hard boots down,
suppress tangle and weed,
crush compost,
except you—pretty mallow,
you may stay.
I’m thinking YES, wild garden,
until a furred fury of
vigorous sinew
erupts in my eyes,
like a scream,
upending all assumptions
with a pink flick of rat-sceptic’s tail.
[With a tip of the hat to Wendy Cope]
the perfect pronunciation may seem unnatural
in this ostensibly reprimanded formless morning cavalcade
turning into a shapeless day of an awkward evening
lost in a mute doorframe
leading to a private cloud of a colorful sky
full with goshawks calling each other
pointing out the plummeting temperature
in the surrounding cities where people
live off the grid due to introvert
blindsided authorities ostentatiously lurking around
protected by their frozen shells
without explicable reason that would make them
taintless before the spirits
and their invented gods
with thin-lipped smiles
concave manhole
shriek as a nail pulled from dry wood
is the sound of death’s hoofs
covering a landscape measure
to reach
a wanna be constable
he who is hamming
behind a promisingly protective curtain of smoke
like an aardvark in the mud
we easily leave death alive
to get rid of creatures
unwished for
name your weapons
they cry
and those who rebel
will reach their demise
the sound of dying
reminds us of a place
we have never wished to discover
how to get rid of evil
light dirtied his pedantically flinching face
the frozen shell of rehearsed authority
cannot grasp the significance of resistance
despite our laid-out world in a stretcher
his confidence is crumbling in the gestures of this particular centrality
he is astonished in glancing at and discovering a two-way traffic in his unadorned brain
that made him lose his equilibrium
his benignity equals with fleecing
one can carry it anywhere
to conventional storefronts
to inconvenient staircases
to a convenient store upstairs
and leave it there as a
compensation of an incredulous notion of
trap buttoned
confidence
I keep some shirts at the far end
of my closet, shirts I’ve owned
for decades (since back when they fit).
I own some shoes with holes in the toe
almost worn through; shoes I’ve kept
in the dark corner of my closet floor.
If you were to ask me why I’ve kept them,
what with the shirt collars an inch
too small and the shoes a few steps shy
of perforated, I’d say, “Well, maybe
someday…”
But we know most somedays never come.
I own a memory I keep safe at the far corner
of my mind; a memory of …something… I’ve kept
for a couple of decades (when I could remember).
I hold this hope, one I’ve worried thin like a child
would his button-eyed, floppy friend, now worn
to almost gossamer thinness,
And if you ask why I’ve kept them,
what with the way most memory fades
in each new day’s light and how gossamer hope
doesn’t spring eternal I’d say, “Well, maybe
someday…”
That's because, if most somedays never come,
that must mean some do.
We watch in pain as they plunder
The middle class worry and wander
Peasants live in wonder
Big bellies parade slums masks covering the stench
They with no hope of tomorrow in hot sun sweat
Listening but not hearing the empty blubber
by bellies under tent’s shade
Hoping they will drop fifty shillings
for the malnourished child's feed
Dust from big taxpayer range blind them, they don’t see
prime Minister leave
The only six public toilets‘ contents lack space
and their smell sickens
They can’t serve them all, they pee and poop in buckets
for the poop man to dispose nearby
The poop man knock their door in the morning
They spent the day listening to prime Minister
so no money for poop man
The heat in slum houses is unbearable
and the poop is boiling in bucket
Coin of the day take malnourished child
to nearby government hospital
Nurses are on strike, no drugs, no doctors, slum dwellers
parade all sick of hunger
Police chase them from hospital
because they don’t have masks
The newshour, prime Minister reported to have built houses
in the slum, hundreds of billions used
They stare in wonder, prime Minister came to ask for their help
He talked of building bridges initiative and need
for voting for constitutional changes
The country needs more leaders and the need
to increase constituencies
Do they have to burn even the small rotten bridges
leading slum dwellers to national cake?
Who will pay the park of wolves that they want to increase?
The prices for commodities shoot overnight
Another day, no pay for poop man, the day spent in hospital
Citizens views needed on constitutional changes
Trillions set aside for a yes or no campaign
Children back to slums teachers on strike
The competition for toilets is worse in the slums,
stench is unbearable
The stench of the greed by ruling class is worse
Global warming has made the sun mad
that it threatens to burn slum houses
The cows graze in the green valley
on grass studded with wildflowers,
drink from a river where trout play
voles dance on through its banks.
They walk to parlour when they want
when their bodies say they need to be milked
hitch themselves to the robotic machine
that cleans udders, sucks the milk away.
There’s little labour for the farmer
no need to round-up, milk or carry
or spray pesticides as his father did:
he’s alerted to all twenty-four hours
for the land looks after itself, rain or shine.
He’ a happy man for his milk sells
for premium prices, he exports it
for its value for its great goodness,
filled with nature’s gentle bounty
and tuned to the season’s rhythms.
The cows, and the productive land
he’ll pass in perfection to his children.
—7/2/2021
Like an actor running lines,
Wilson had stories.
The first of us who left Vermont, he tells,
was the elder on foot who followed Indian trails
taking months to cross New York
then staked a claim, and walked back.
The first families
moved kin, livestock
to this homestead,
right here, and worked it
for two hundred years.
Through winters, hardships,
storms and drought,
sickness and deaths,
we settled, farmed, built on…
and finally, a school.
Some gave up.
We did not.
Perhaps land accepts a steward.
Wilson at 93 remembers.
go out the window in warm weather;
the pain of misunderstanding,
the excuses, the predictions…
out
with the renewed force of spring,
strength surfaces,
and breathing in again,
we meet the recovering day
Apache Mare
Breathing clouds to the warming air,
in the faithful future of all her years;
proud and natural,
present as a boulder in the way of a path.
Chestnut flank pressed against a rising sun
this light, this field—all her own
there is no other place
no other world.
I see a branch of the watchful tree (Jer. 1:11-12).
Cyclones, starving polar bears, rising seas;
winter lightning, flooded deserts, bleaching corals—
nature sends a pandemic to clear the smoggy skies.
And the trees are falling, because they must.
New Haven green: The Lincoln Oak heaves up
a human skull, jaws agape among exposed roots.
Elms kamikaze onto the Bronco, the Matrix—
the Jag glutted with Exxon, Sunoco, Shell.
The trees are doing what they can:
fan-leafed gingkoes faint onto garages;
poplars yee-hah onto Sertas,
axe Maytags, scrape Vizios off walls.
That kettle-drumming is the fall of spruce trees
scoring streets into musical staffs—
loosening wires to coil and recoil into clefs,
to pizzicato like rattlers.
Colonnades of cypress explode gas lines
and bonzo into resulting fires.
Maples, like massive pick-up sticks,
rubble trains, logjam rivers, karate bridges.
Of course, yews slam into their own shadows.
Of course, dogwoods release the August sky
to make massive snowballs of themselves,
while willows amputate their own limbs.
Let the beeches curl their trunks around benches,
Harleys, hydrants, and wrought iron fences.
Appease the teaks reclaiming themselves from chairs;
the pines from paneling; the cedars from pencils.
Oh, Berkeley, the laurels are hearing each other
in forests—the telephone poles are in caucus.
And the sycamore in charge has angled itself,
like a cannon, atop a Dodge Avenger
whose front left Firestone is stalled
on a felled Seventh Day billboard,
on words I thought that I shall never see:
...pare for the Unexpected.
Single electric candle lights
on clear lancet window sills.
No wash of headlights from departing
4X4s and sedans. No pastor. No pianist.
No faithful since pandemic.
I park my Prius by the blocked trailhead,
poke in the code to unlock the side door,
press the baby grand’s B-flat key
for my Phantom of the Opera song.
I, who accompanied my divorced mother
to Sunday mass, her lace-and-beribboned
ornament; I, praised for how still I kept
while she solo-ed; I, Glee Club nuns’
choice alto, because I stayed on pitch
backing sopranos in their soaring;
I, who made harmony of family harm,
hurtled hurts, promenade down the nave,
spread my arms wide to the pews;
breathe full my belly and chest and face
to sing Christine D.’s longing, pierce
through my new high G on the word strength;
the struts and beams of this old vaulted ceiling,
my back-up altos, tenors, baritones, echoing
Wishing I could hear your voice, again.
“Singing in an Empty Church” first appeared in Verse-Virtual, February, 2021
Abundance of Caution
Gallon cans of mixed greens from Georgia;
crates of Vidalia onions from Texas;
Gouda and Beemster-Van Gogh from Amsterdam;
N-95s, face screens, and latex gloves from China—
it’s Christmas every day.
Boxes of gluten free pizza dough,
cases of sardines and Bush’s baked beans,
36 individual servings of Skinny popcorn
appear in the open garage.
Elizabeth, our postwoman, noticed
we date our mail and packages—
and now does that for us,
and brings our garbage cans up the driveway.
UPS George honks the horn,
so we know to get into the house.
We do not breathe where others have breathed.
We wait the three hours aerosols linger,
we wait five hours, to be honest,
then tap the garage remote.
Deliveries season for seven days,
before we slice open the box seams,
dig through Styrofoam peanuts,
un-bubblewrap, unziplock—bleach-wipe contents
to wait on the dryer for another day—
or two, or three.
I don’t walk the lane anymore—
a car with open windows might have passed by.
I walk the periphery of our three acres.
Then ten feet in—neighbors putter in driveways,
walk dogs, call out greetings.
I mentally measure how many six-feet away—
twelve, fifteen, eighteen—even twenty-four, too close.
Now I only walk near the house,
tapping on the walls for balance,
the circle tightening.
When I hear Elizabeth’s rickety truck,
I run inside and wash my hands.
I wash my hands.
What happens when all the advocates are gone, and those who profit
Unknowingly from battles fought by others, must learn to cope
Without
The hope
Of realizing change? Then,
The ones whom martyrdom didn’t spare,
Will no longer be enslaved by the victims
Who took for granted their wares
And the rest will be left
Questioning their fates.
But those who sought their downfall, while victorious,
Will find the only game they won was hate.
Is there still time to make something
From the impending dread?
When every combination
Produces yet another
Form of lead,
Slowing progress with
Its predictable weight,
While the true value of currency is forced to sit and stagnate –
Knowing it can work for good, knowing it’s been misunderstood –
Hoping for systemic change, before it’s finally too late.
Who We Are
We are the terrorists,
Who condone the murders of
Innocent children on their school buses, or
Lock them away from parents and loved ones,
Giving them a foil-blanket
Substitute for comfort.
We are the unreasonable,
Who close off
Our safe harbors—
The same ones our ancestors
Were offered—
From others.
We are the presumptuous,
Supposing the world
Will keep giving to us
Without repercussions
For our actions, while we
Continue our greedy consumption.
This is what it means
To be American,
In the land who shot the man
Who said, “We shall overcome!”
So, if this is who we are,
Who, then, shall we become?
The BeZine 