Day 2: National Poetry Month Celebration features Schwartz, Atassi, Farfaglia, Grant-Oyeye

RIVER/ ROAD

You live not by a river but a road, both ribbons

of coming back after leaving, both full of flow

and noise and seasonal change. You did not have

a chance to choose. The road was what you could afford.

A river is what happens in dreams

and at least in one memory of a brief

sojourn, the still green surface, mysterious

opposite bank, clinging to the mind. Road

memories hover more plentiful yet often

painful: I'll stop this car and put you two out

and leave. We believe what we learn

to believe. If you had a river you could

mess about with boats although a road

may seduce into lawless wild rides.

Later you would take roads through fields

of swaying bright heads tossing buttery

in the sun toward cool dim rivers a shell

of a craft could navigate. Live where you must,

yet hear above cicadas and crow, sparrow-song

and woodchuck burrowing, rude road sounds that 

take you back and forth in memory before sleep 

on the rough thoroughfare that is your life's journey.

Dip your paddle up and back, up and back, until

you come upon the nest of osprey wide across

as many a river, full of raucous life, embattled wings,

in a place no road can reach. In this way you will not

neglect the river's constant path along the tributaries

that supply the heart.

                                   

© 2017 Patricia Roth Schwartz                    

Waterloo, NY                        

Patricia Roth Schwartz (photo provided)

 * * *

Break-Ins

Dad came from a country

where a man rolled up in a tank

to the President's front door in midday

& knocked hard on all the olive trees.

So when he came here in 1972, he puzzled

over the furtive scandal, people crawling under

dark desks like hide-and-seek television, shining midnight

flashlights in windows of locked offices

with eagles on their doors.  Years

Later, his face of softer stone & his hair

a thread of faith across the head, my father bent

in sweeping shards of a break-in, his office-

door now only a frame for his gathering up

glass, fragments reflecting the man's eyes trying

Not to break. It was the same office I cat-burgled one

night in my 20s, with keys and flashlight, looking

for pills and a syringe to lullaby the insurgents

blowing holes in my head's mosque. Or

Like the masjid in Parma, our imam Fawaz Damra

gliding in white among tall bleached walls, his beard's

black ringlets tumbling down to white carpets, curled

like Arabic, glittering there. Until one 12th of September

A  man & his Confederate flag drove a truck through

the east wall's right to stand, expecting to find something

terrible inside. All he found was what all break-

ins find, a man sitting alone among silent doors, his

arms crossed, his face turned away, his lips forgetting

they were open once.

© 2016 Samir F. Atassi                                  

Westlake, OH                        

* * *

Puzzling                                                                                                         

Texas was how I began,

the piece bigger than my hand;

California was simply a breeze,

I’d just rest it by the ocean

with ease.

Florida was fun, a hitchhiker’s thumb

I’d point south to get out of the snow;

New York, my home no matter where I’d roam,

looked due north, where Maine would go.

Then it was off to the Great Lakes

to easily slip on Michigan’s mitten;

taking a rest on my way out west,

I’d snuggle the Dakotas like two kittens.

Alaska and Hawaii, the oddball two,

went off to the side in Pacific blue,

and wasn’t it clever bunching New England together,

in fact, it was downright terrific!

Mississippi and Alabama went back to back,

ready to walk ten paces and shoot;

meanwhile, settling Oklahoma by its handle,

I’d drop in Louisiana’s work boot…

‘til I was down to the last few,

too little or too middle-America

to ever know them by name –

but I kept at it all the same

loving when those states fit just right,

piece by piece, watching my country unite.

© 2017 Jim Farfaglia                         

Fulton, NY  

                           

Jim Farfaglia (photo provided)

* * *

Moving On

It was as if we learned, to love in the middle -
a conversation
in which you mentioned your love for colors:
in which you called them mirrors in a mirror-
the unreeling of rusted rinds.

First green grew to be your favorite.
I listened to whispers of green leaf blades-
a pact deep in tender veins as
if they were tendered roots.

Next purple touched your tongue tip-
a pigment spread out ever so gently, slowly
as if it would flow through your palate
to covert ridges of your being.

Here we go yet again. We hold multiple colors
of autumn, watch our old lust float like leaves
buried in the errant dance of re-incarnated winds.
Let me wish once again that I may find green
Yet again in the mold on the wall
upon which my silent gaze is locked.

© 2016 Lind Grant- Oyeye               

Prince George, British Columbia, Canada     

Lind Grant-Oyeye

 *   *   *

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