Donna Pucciani has published poetry worldwide in such diverse journals as Shi Chao Poetry, Poetry Salzburg, Acumen, nebulab, Feile Festa, The Pedestal, and Journal of Italian Translation. Her seventh and most recent book of poems is EDGES.
California Dreamin’
All real living is meeting.—Martin Buber
It’s important to get the basics.—Mahnaz Saberi
They can hear the bulldozers rumble down, to raze all
their makeshift dwellings in the camp. Real
people live here, but those living
nearby complain of noise and theft. Fear is
what fuels the brightly-lit machinery, this violent meeting.
One woman, 44, a shed-dweller, says it’s
urgent to save what’s important
for her friends―blankets, flashlights, a grill—to
warn them that their plywood shanties will get
no mercy. Life here is the
splintered furniture of poverty, where stars are the only basics.
End Zone
Somebody died yesterday.
Then another and another.
I saw their souls sitting on the prairie,
wrapped in blankets and sun.
Should I speak to them now, or wait?
Stay calm. Go from bed to pen and back.
The paper’s there for conversation.
Ink on pages will outlast me,
when persons become ghosts
and a whole world of anima hangs above
like webs on a chandelier.
It is the living who pray to strange gods,
who make laws and break them
in our short, foolish lives,
who worry when the roof leaks, a cellar floods,
who torture each other, cage children,
who keep walking our daily rounds, thinking of youth,
waiting to slide into the dark.
Who will mourn us, someone or no one?
I will wrap myself in wind.
I will pull the needles from my arms,
the tubes from my mouth. My skin, tissue-thin,
will be the memory of veins in a leaf.
My fragility will bloom with wordless affection
for the living and the dead. My bones
will disintegrate, their ashes rise to meet
my ancestors on some mountain or cityscape,
their dust in the skyscrapers they built,
stone on stone.
– Previously published in Poetry Salzburg
Somewhere the Sea
San Donato di Ninea, Italy
A window dressed in mystery:
curtains allow only a glimpse
of rooftops, the drift of rain,
the promise of sea. Where they part,
a sliver of balcony cuts the hills.
For ten days, we live intimately
with strangers, lost cousins.
The old house smells of wax
and wood and family.
Standing at the sill, we listen
to found music, the blood singing
in the moment when the air is hungry.
Chimneys lean into each other.
Below us, a small white cat
crouches on a doorstep between
two flowerpots, her fur
wet with rain, her head
a little ball of fallen sky.
The invisible sea, with its
warm waves, stones and shells,
its white-rimmed restlessness,
its life of grasping and letting go,
asks nothing less of us
than surrender.