POEMS
My House
The struggle against power is the struggle against forgetting
-Milan Kundera
Downing storms lift away night
a new morning breaks through rubble—rescues
me from dreams deafened by F-16 fighter jets,
deadened by MK-84 mega-bombs
from twilight’s empire
of twisted rebar, pulverized lives, the living stench
of burnt-to-the-bone toddlers, forever asleep
in weeping, fragmented mothers
Where to rest their slaughtered love
in this unmoved calendar of butchered tomorrows?
while clearing a new day of oxygen-starved newborns
the addled street sweeper recites multiplication tables
and the intrepid doctor’s tear-soaked voice ascends
the rising emptiness of a stairway clinging
to one more mangled school….
but no amount of coffee this morning muffles red flags
flapping in his plea, we are dying now, hear me….
And while the street sweeper reimagines
torched oleanders, tenderly gathers
the death count mounting outside besieged Al Shifa Hospital
nails it to the doors of the Knesset and Whitehouse,
exponential body bags press against my door—
it’s my doorbell the disremembered murdered ring.
And all the while a naked girl races through my hallways.
Skin seared by Napalm’s sooty bloom, she flees
into the TV’s all-consuming lens—on her heels,
a train of scalded children and moms
cradling limp babes in their arms
and like recurrent echoes of a barbed heartbeat
a skeletal girl clad in Auschwitz stripes
and her knobby-kneed twin riffle my kitchen,
hands stuffed with bread, oranges and history
they sit cross-legged before the blazing fireplace,
in the flames, their heartbroken mother flickers
her glittering blue eyes and powerful arms
shield a Palestinian newborn
the two cry out
as mother and child
float off
chimney smoke scarring the sky.
The Archivist
My birthright, that schoolboy’s pebbled leather satchel
carted from Calabria’s parched paradise,
companion to the weighty desktop encyclopedia—
two volumes flaunting the Italian you courted
with a chevalier’s ink, pages doubly bound
by a cavaliere’s lust for wisdom and verse,
your pen biding beauty’s brio.
Did that pliant vault soften the rough Atlantic
by harboring sea and earth, a twirl of hair,
your mother’s picture, a Mediterranean shell
or did it lay destitute—an expectant void
fertile only with the future—to shelter, say
the antics and annals of no-account players,
unschooled scholars foiling each day’s
scatter in a swirl of dreamless sleep?
You, an autodidact scribe, logging lofty
and nitty-gritty rhythms, an archivist piecing lives,
gathering pages, images, musings against forgetting
ourselves, fleeting as ephemera fading,
the blank life threatening…
Your voice set against erasure like a piazza
composing public memory—unthinkable to overcome
without a word, poverty’s rubble, a tongue-tied exile,
the rupture of family and familiars–so before
the time-card’s whistle, rise from ruins with the light,
veto silence by marking unremarked characters.
With no home, no wife and kids, no money
you pulled into Toronto, gravitated to a communized
Victorian in Little Italy, five fellow loners your roommates,
at night again, you roused a pen flush with oceanic currents,
spewed satirical rhyme echoing migrant woes—
the ugly looks and bum rap brutality hostile
Hogtown Anglos heaped on dirty, hot-blooded wops,
or pick-pocket priests preaching dollars over prayer
as proper love of God, tagging you the devil’s twin
for acerbic songs limned in cobalt lines wailing
in that satchel sanctuary—peasant wit, a grave chronicler
waxing to populist poet—witness to the overlooked moment.
Back home you glossed an imaginary figure
fragmented in air mail letters spilling poignant
mea culpas for meagre funds dispatched,
and mother weeping blue tears in epistles,
wringing work-hardened hands lest love be disfigured
in a vast sky where time’s fault cracks bonds
so hunger and thirst no longer remember vows
that bind night to day summing to half a decade
to reunion at Union Station…
all the while recording, animating space with glaring
photographs depicting a black and white city of men
missing women: clippings from giornali and newspapers,
missives from intellectual cronies to Il Giornale di Toronto
homesick magazines pushing glamour-puss celebs,
cryptic columns from The Globe and Telegram,
ideological posturing, political double-talk and mirth:
an elect obvious and oblique, revenants suspended
in that immigrant treasury—the past
passed on—becoming…
You kissed a toddler goodbye, we touched again
as strangers. Shaped by your passions and persona
I contoured into a mirror, prizing books, stage and poets.
Afloat in the sixties, my rebel-girl favoured brandy
and smokes chasing a freedom that eluded you;
only 25, raging tears on that goodnight a burst aorta
blitzed your heart, I refuged in the bathroom,
sipped whiskey, toasted Dylan Thomas.
Your paper remains abide as my inheritance, a death
transcending re-collection crafting a man unreadable
beyond the workaday barbershop and prosaic papa,
his ars vitae time-capsuled in crumbling skin.
For decades I cart, guard, closet that satchel, avoid
trespassing upon a stashed away bio.
Now, at an age when saving promises
no end other than itself, over a private telling,
I crave an opening—the found moment
where ephemera evolves as history.
To rouse a life bigger than a daughter’s lens
or genealogical myth, my dig flounders as I unravel
yellowed years, haloed ink blurred by neglect.
I strain to decode Italianate script and shifting form
to enter a writ become my second tongue
and revel in your philosophic drift.
Musing on wounded jottings and smart-ass aphorisms,
wistful for your knowing smile and soulful spunk—
eloquent clocks re-verse to banquet halls; again I witness
you speechifying marrying rhetoric and lyric at festive nuptials
or brains and book-learning to endorse a politico paesano
vying for votes reaching to unlock the “ethnic” paddock.
Then on to clashing missives when I blew Toronto
to get back-to-the-land (the very life you’d evacuated)
and set my hippy soul free in nota bene New Brunswick,
verbal fisticuffs we threw across generations—muscular,
laced with bloody love, so as I write my heart
sounds, longing—to lean into your warmth.
To woo the chief archivist at the Fisher Rare Book Library,
like a tutored orator and done-good poet,
I piece your story between cerulean covers.
A go-between shuttling voices, faces, crossings
and landings—with unalloyed hope, I unscroll
your artful artifact, the bittersweet, sweat-soaked diary
of two interconnected, disconnected countries.
Yes
paper binds beginning to end
sealed by final words penned on that farewell morn,
the salutation—your arabesque signature
a lettered last kiss, archived, winging off the page
into illuminated finding.
“The Archivist” won 1st prize in The Venera Poetry Contest. “The Archivist” is the story of an immigrant to Canada from Calabria. The initial quality the reader will notice is the firm grasp the author has on free-verse prosody (so rare these days!); this is a well-constructed poem. The tale it tells is a common one, and it reminds Canadian readers that Canada is much more than a country of people whose roots go back to either the British Isles or France. It deals with the struggles immigrants face: poverty, learning a new language, separation from family, etc. And it deals with the attempt to retain something of the “old country” in the new one. Finally, the actual immigrants experience a separation from their children and grandchildren in that their descendants are “full” Canadians while the immigrants are “hyphenated” Canadians, caught, as it were, between two countries. (And this works the other way, too — children born and raised in Canada often have trouble relating to their foreign-born parents.) Importantly, readers are reminded of the vital role the tales of these new Canadians play in making Canada what it is — a nation of many different, and valid, stories. All this and more is covered in this remarkable poem — James Deahl
HOME - SICK
A story out of a bat cave,
set in invisible ink afflicts the headlines
a cimmerian microbe blights garden and street
flings spring into lockdown—
given the opacity of tomorrow, of airports in a chokehold,
our wings collapse—stranded
dragging sagging hearts, we head indoors.
Flashing a punk-spiked crown, this viral marauder
wields exponential power, dictates bulletins,
updates the death count, outlaws touch
as it proliferates via lips and hands.
Statisticians and medics crunch numbers, ride
vectors and peaks, map deadly intersections
where each neighbour or passerby veils the odds.
Where each citizen disfigures the social contract,
two metres mandate mortal isolates;
with wary looks, we damn each other,
shun hugs, shed the pat on the back.
Under a sky gasping for oxygen, corpses pile up,
eyeing hazmat-suited nurses mirroring hellish
sisters-of-mercy—we settle for air kisses.
Borders toughen and turn icy, bristle with searchlights,
each beam pins stranger to strangling invader.
At breakneck speed the mace-like butcher
lacerates the poor, penetrates slaughterhouses
and prison cells, slashes elders damned
to infernal retirement havens where bankers
hurl barbed stars at the homesick perdu.
And aren’t we all legislated homebodies now— homesick for air?
Sizing up our clannish cages, we pace
between grandma’s handwritten recipes and legible screens,
blow out virtual birthday candles and make a wish
for this to end. Grounded in domesticity, long days
echo the tempo of sourdough and seedlings.
Exiled from this long-suffering earth, we circle
in bubbles, turn inward and unclock,
kid around and lose at Payday—
with work and play bound in yellow caution-tape,
life’s bustling whirl screeches to a dead stop—
deserted streets throw up the homeless,
benched, with no roof to shelter-in-place; each day
bares the raw-boned body of caregivers and migrant workers,
bilked as they scrub toilets and fill the fridge,
a wing and a prayer, their only PPE.
Two metres is not the social distance separating us,
it’s the rift between homeless and housed,
the gulf between essential and non-essential,
the chasm between have and have-not,
exposed and cleft deeper by an equalizing virus
unmasking the fault plaguing us.
PLANTING LIGHT
“Planting Light” was written in October 2019, to support the auto workers at the Oshawa General Motors plant. It is published in the Spring 2020 issue of Our Times (Canada's Independent Labour Magazine).
My lungs ache, my chest tightens
when I remember the skylark’s grounded wings,
the mangled contract;
how fossil fuel tycoons, every day
get away with murder,
while snug, in private planes, smug GM execs
jet through workday rainbows,
incinerating four generations of auto workers;
all the while poormouthing, emitting do-gooder bunk
as secretly, they idle the clock.
Mum about concessions and two-tiered wages,
assembly lines rear ended as they pile up dinero;
tight-lipped about billions in lapsed loans
or in-cahoots politicians–forgive
and forget about GM on the dole
pocketing bailouts as backhanded bounty
so corporate bums ride on the taxpayer’s dime
then crash the books ‘til numbers combust
to a scorched earth policy.
And Mary Barra, cushy
in the company’s stretch-limo hearse,
driving a geopolitical dirge for Oshawa,
hitching our unallocated plant to a no-rules playbook,
steering daily bread south to another
maquiladora spewing cars and trucks
to line GM’s pockets with beggared Mexican workers.
And far from crude-slicked beaches, far
from gulls glazed in black gold,
oily Molochs brew barrels of ecocide,
blind to babes bartered to Exon and the Koch Brothers,
deaf to teens exhausted by the internal combustion engine,
choking on tomorrow going up in smoke.
Brave and unruly—the young who eye
the maple leaf rusting against melting polar ice,
who bear witness to the ravaged grandeur
of Atlantic right whales sacrificed
to drunken cruise ships and dollar-store freight carriers,
who flag climate refugees pitched
by ocean waves fisting the sky.
Too green are they to weather hope flattened
by hurricanes, cutting class each Friday
to tug the state’s ear closer to truth;
aggrieved and grieving they stare down the UN’s fake nod,
and bigwigs who back away from a future snuffed
by the ever-thin promise of permanent jobs flowing
from trickle-down economics through pipelines,
into the shareholders’ insatiable maw.
Cavalier guardians hold hostage their planet
rub out the moon, torch the stars—
it’s no surprise that Oshawa darkens
when a kingpin daddy fuses dream to nightmare
and torpedoes the kid next door.
But if parents love progeny,
they must keep house—be one with Earth;
One’s a number that grows on itself
person by person, summons unity—
sums pushback and power, nurturing union,
like vanguard Greta daring One global choir,
tuning street and jungle to emerald anthem,
to human harmony, mantled Amazon air;
in concert we’re Nature’s all indigenous union
seeding a clearing through carbonized sky.
And One shouts NO to an orderly wind-down
Oshawa seizes the front seat, keeps on
the lights; beacons for citizens, workers hail
E-vehicles, laser bulldozer blight.
A fresh plant electrifies GM’s shuttered heart,
again, dawns the people’s diamond-hard light.
VENTURE: WELLS, B.C.
“Venture: Wells, B.C.” poem will be published in The Trinity Review, Issue TR132.
The blackest crow rends morning dew,
raucous inkwells surge, slur words;
how is it robins shit on the tiger lily’s redhead roar,
that the teacher’s thunderclap dumbfounds innocents?
Russet hawkweed stifles our lilies—wither
and rust—the house, dog-hungry;
all night, Goldcorp lays with the stone-broke river,
each yes man pans a harlequin whore, soft-shoes
over tailings, trips’n splits his lip,
open pit and cyanide heap—already the mourning dove.
18 karat dust haloes the bride, ‘till death do us part;
stark, the silver birch against sentinel conifers.
When poets buzz in people’s ears they’re dinged
and flattened—characters scoring a fresh page.
SOLAR FLORALS COLLECTION
Solar Florals
“In this four-part elegy, the sun shadows life with death; the sunflower faces light but is backed by shade; the Apollonian and leonine hero - a working-class Lycidas - is crashing from drug addiction … [to] the final section of this miniature, …. ‘let those who can memorize light / eclipse their demons,’ hit hard the heart … Giovanna Riccio is a poet of divine - I mean indomitable - gifts. Each unconventional - i.e., insolently brilliant - line summers, in ‘florid burst - August / spiking the air’.” - George Elliott Clarke, 2019. (Solar Florals have been published in Exile Quaterly, 42.3, p.98.)
Heliotropism
That word sunflower stiffs the lithe go-getter—
sprightly beam-catcher
more limber the camber of girasoleor tournesol
troping improbable brilliance.
A novice bloom mimes sun,
when night drops, it pivots east,
lies low until Apollo cycles up
to recharge instinct, boost circadian spunk.
The sunflower senses the cloud’s coverup
limns elusive winds, never snuffs life’s spark.
All grown up, the seasonedhelianthus
comes to a stand still, a last stand;
the summer sage, far-seeing,
tilts eastward for good—back
shrouded by shade—facing
dusky fire whorling to seed.
Anti-helios
My rebel sunflower roused
a fey bad-boy toting loud bouquets,
yellow fields romancing canvas, tall photographs,
our shields against stygian spooks
or sleep broken by daddy’s drink-primed rage,
no angel’s skirt rustling refuge either,
only threadbare motherlove drubbed to flight
cracked plaster and babes tip-toeing on eggshells,
you rapping adoleful couplet
Don’t push me’ cause I’m close to the edge
an anthem, half smile, half- epitaph
Sometimes I wonder, how I keep from going under….
from pitching into wintry soil
where no happy-flower could root,
layers of blushing shirts you piled on, a poor fix
for below-zero shivers, smug classmates a-snicker,
the teacher’s cold feet jammed in her craven mouth.
In your godforsaken house, the fridge chilled
one crystalline bottle of Smirnoff leaving you,
as senior sibling, to lift Spam, soda crackers
and canned soup for ravenous kids,
to bust a lamp on your father’s putrid noggin
lurid, over your sister—shattered,
you gathered light shards and at 14, split
for a gamin’s dawn, a castaway crashing
in an underlit furnace room; castoff blankets
and solo boy crunching lifesavers in the two-dog night.
By instinct you and Henry found each other,
twohellions, leonine, on the scrapheap
chalking fighting words in alleyways,
slinging booze to quell mean-cop fists,
turning birthdays to drink, drugs and dealing,
or three-squares in jail where you learned to do laundry
and to bleach the night with smack that left bruises
trailing up your arm and wasted you
to a hungry slip needling ghosts.
Then Henry stone-cold on the bed
from too much memory and dirty junk,
you, at the window afraid to shoot up,
reaching through panes, petrified veins
and dead wood, eyeballing sun detoxing fog.
Helios Crashing
So, nothing left but to doff
the lab coat’s bluff, cut surgical babble
snaking through drip tubes, (nothing here we can’t reverse)
The crescent moon stabs my breast
grief’s bone-sliver blow; wheels hurling
to no-exit—huis clos,
no emergency exit--
driving a one-way good bye
down an asphalt mourning ribbon—nothing
but death is irreparable.
If only the corridor were a two-way street,
but there’s no way back, no call to dodge
darkness; with the hospital room off life-support,
dawn streams in, purling light
--your body gone lucid,
no more air hunger or thirst for cause,
only you spiriting sun,a halcyon amen
conjuring our beloved willow tree
and you forever handsome,
bookish on the beat-up bench
bathed in April rays;
And I your lover;
your name rising, mint on my lips
and warm, in my empty hand, our first dance,
when we broke ground
straining for sky.
Alone, I draped you in emerald silk, planted
one lone sunflower breaking over your heart.
Helianthus Kiss
Five years clean you blew in, an end,
a beginning glossing New Year’s Eve
jivers, DJs, you and me itching for alchemy
looking to blaze blues into gold.
Me older, you doing the mature student thing,
we gamboled an incendiary twosome—swayed
and sashayed, dazing bad-luck and bad lovers;
hot on midnight’s heels, we twirled a volte face
two-stepped to dawn, to sleep afresh, rise anew.
All winter, I fed you tomato-laced penne,
sharp parmigiano, pears, sparkling water,
stoked logs on the fire, rearranged bygones
to a high-ceiling refuge for Shangri-la.
But let those who can memorize light,
eclipse their demons; yours lay low like hitmen
chafing beneath skin and though you rallied
after each smashing hit, veered into dog-eared books,
or twisted Buddha-like in lotus, each relapse
scored a black sheep fading to a done deal,
dead kidneys, dialysis, blood circling--
I fire up the computer’s sleeping screen
--sunflower halo over your name;
railing against February’s feeble sky,
I trek Bloor Street florist shops,
unearth a crush of sun-fisted helianthus
and stud the living room with love’s
petulant corona—each insolent torch,
each florid burst—August
spiking the air.