poet and educator
“I’m With Stinky,”
the tee-shirt read.
My mother was appalled.
“Why would one put
such a thing upon a child?”
I was older than a child when
an impromptu palm reader
told me my intuition
line did not exist.
Intuition / indecision – Always was
good at the latter, bad at the former.
In these [fill in your own hyperbolic
adjective] times, when the family
of the familiar is estranged,
I’m cultivating a new companion –
Instinct.
I call her “Stinky.”
I ask, “What say you, Stinky?
Shall we, or no?”
She nods, shakes or nudges.
I’m with her.
Land of My Father's War
Adopted, Relinquished Country
I was a child
taken to the Old World,
to a country my father
met in war. Loved and left.
Occupied again.
Country aflutter with gestures,
fluted with vowels.
One of medieval pageants,
bronze horses, colored glass,
Rooftop theater,
cheesecloth robes,
Pinocchio masks.
Our Italian primer:
Oggi. Today.
Place a child might thrive.
We returned to our native land and
I left the bosom of the family
for the straight edge of first grade.
Desks in rows and Dick & Jane.
Foreigner, a classmate hissed.
Dad tried to keep
old words afloat. Piccolina,
poverina…
We don’t need that here, I replied.
Oggi, the lost language soothes
and rankles. I find tomorrow,
domani, in cognates. But
what of yesterday?
Ah, ieri, all ephemera,
ieri.
