Poems

Alphas

Before the body and tears

the Serpent’s syllabic length

rounds Woman’s invoiced paradise—

grassy ankles, secondary ribs

and unversed mammalian breasts

mean little.

Despite the thou-shalt-not threat

the talking head leans in and

their tête-à-tête stirs in her

a yen for the fruit’s smart flesh

her mouthy bite breaks into scarlet skin,

the rebel crunch resounds—

by Her hand, the apple scores the Alpha letter.

Bossy where art-thous call now-knowing eyes to heel

ground the agitator angel to dust-kissing reptile

exile mom and dad to lowly servant’s digs where

all the clocks start ticking

still, such unforgiving light spells an exile’s

rightful home mortgaged now to a greybeard

who drops in Adios palms, a secret clod of heaven

the outlaw seed clotted in its core

slamming the garden gate, Adam’s

free hand whorls a soiled fist

at that fatal sentence planted now

in every tongue at birth She

tastes salt-water kisses inhales jasmine winds

liberty’s musk-sass in terra firma

I think I conceive says Eve.

Frankly A Woman

for Ursula Franklin (1921-2016)

Un-Apologia

WAR calcifies the mind’s mantle, ossifies thought, fossilizes the skull. My teen hands rake and salvage rubble, decode German stone. First woman geologist at the University of Toronto, I gold-leaf a skull-and-crossbones calligraphy for the Book of Radium. A Quaker, I tremble like a night-quivered light house beam, witness how words leak FEAR, how dread’s stutter gutters brain and heart. Where Bosch skeletons girder nodding heads, the president choreographs an Atomic Danse Macabre. Beneath the lodestar, a sulphurous O encircles mushrooming egos. Terror discharged, nuclear lullabies turn soporific, but I am an insomniac, a rock scientist Geiger-counting collateral radiation lurking in babies’ virgin teeth. Result? Nuclear testing goes underground.

Ursula Franklin Contemplates the Manhattan Project

God does not play dice with the world, Einstein pontificated

yet, people do say I so say

Earth is a deceptive rock

volatile seething

at its gut

its surface concord a shell game

the upper-crust a hard-sell façade

occluding tectonic amity in iffy equipoise

gritty plates seesawing

an elemental tug-o-war

ridge scrapes slab, its push n pull

pressurizes resistance

An earthquake is no accidental secret

only a noisy planet cracking under a smouldering core

fuming through mantle to crust

booming seismic rupture

To my point, human genius gilds

a gory mimicry

so heavenly bombs tailspin

in the abrupt rumble

of the technocrat’s pro-Hiroshima breach

from violated skies planes blitzkrieg psalms

bricked-in lives crumble

concrete crumples corpses into monstrous twists

and rough prayers guide our descent

to subterranean beings

Witness my birth on a Jewish fault line

strained by post war tectonics become theologies

compelled by the Treaty of Versailles’ fun-house mirrors

and at this epicentre, a beerhall orator’s snarl

a jingo Sunday painter jolting the jungvolk’s grudge

kicking up brown-shirted throbs

jack-booted payback for the volatile nerves

of German volk seesawing wheelbarrows

of mercurial, dissolute deutsche marks

By’ 33 the putschist stomps from beerhall

to Reichstag. Underdog brouhaha rumbles

as Chancellor Hitler spit-flecks his flock

with vulpine bloodlust

smarting Aryans come to heel

the sky-slap of slant Heils

augurs goosestepping troops

set to kick off Europe’s shellacking

and stoke bonfires to torch Jewish chutzpah.

Munich born and paternally protestant

mother’s six-pointed Star of David

hit the spotlight back in ’43,

SS hooligans schooled me in precocious panic

dragooned mom and dad into a cattle car

set for Auschwitz and me a

lone 17-year-old yanked from my books

ranked for chain-gang slavery

eighteen months

of fingering through rubble for salvage

as Jack Frost gnawed legs, feet, toes

each winter to this day, an acute

permafrost lament chills my flesh.

Know that this daughter

of the camps, this subject

of the blue-tattoo empire

outlasted

the Fuhrer’s Keres-driven gas

to be primordial Earth’s subversive advocate

a geologist chasing down inborn peace

digging up deposits of golden goodwill

dormant in Earth’s inner life and my own

interior light quaking before God’s

peaceable kingdom

Wisdom tells me peace demands

more than the silencing of the Messerschmitt’s spitfire

that humanity’s sweet spot craves Fear’s finale

But Einstein, trying to put the brakes on radioactive Hitler

goes nuclear

his thumping dread hectors his pen

onto Szilard’s letter, convinces Roosevelt

to rubber stamp The Manhattan Project

the chain reaction bombards thought

the hypothetical string multiplies, amplifies angst

blinding a world citizen, wonder-struck by Beauty,

who exited the Reich, embraced his stateless status

and peacenik parley induced by the smug swagger

of war chemists pioneering death’s

sly breath as chlorine gas Now

scuttlebutt wafts through the Kaiser Institute…

a certain heavy metal

one with the highest atomic weight

is hot stuff that Germans are hoarding

Czech uranium

Observe how probability spurs imagination

reifies Reich physicists slicing atoms into concatenations

of neutron-driven triumph and POOF

ahhh nihil ation

Witness Einstein’s vexed hand

set his weighty autograph to the page

landing in Roosevelt’s hands

how terror’s relay powers up

The Mad Hatter Manhattan Project

in New Mexico talking skulls

and five-star uniforms doom

a corpse-clotted Earth

to A- bombs mushrooming….

And woe to the éminence-gris

who laments the éclat of his name

detonating on a White House desk

if only he had taken the long view

and looked past the Presidential Rose Garden

he may have spied the General

jigging his boots at Los Alamos

annexing the faraway plains of Alamogordo

for Trinity, a newfangled grim reaper

who will speed down New Mexico’s

Route of the Dead Man

and soar into the nuclear age

Cradled in Enola Gay’s inaugural foray

America’s ten-thousand-pound baby

nicknamed Little Boy

fireballs Hiroshima and in a trice

vaporizes 100,000 humans

Oh, we scientists are sorry

after-the-fact visionaries

stranded on a remote Alcatraz

of technological imperatives

until Japan’s incinerated shadow citizens

killed Oppenheimer’s cool

drove his chain-reaction doppelganger

to mutter a fatal soliloquy I am become

Death,

the destroyer of worlds—

Now note Einstein’s wild-haired regret his atonement

via the Russell-Einstein Manifesto

and Pugwash Conference.

But each researcher knows it is the long shot

she must pre-view, so glimpse Lise Meitner

the first atom splitter, minding

her farseeing lioness-heart looking askance

at atom bomb yeasayers

Summoned to join the Manhattan bromance

she demurred at mass murder chanced a womanly

NEIN.

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

“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

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.

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.

Midnight crows rend morning dew,

raucous inkwells surge, slur lines

how is it robins shit on the tiger lily’s redhead roar

that the teacher’s bloody pen thunderclaps innocents?

Russet hawkweed stifles our lilies—wither

and rust—the house, dog-hungry

all night, Goldcorp woos the stone-broke river,

each yes-man pans a diamond ringed score

soft shoes over tailings, trips’n splits his lip.

Open pit and cyanide blooms already the mourning dove,

18 karat dust haloes the bride till death do us part

stark, the silver birch against dark 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.