DONNA PUCCIANI - POEMS

Donna Pucciani, a Chicago-based writer, has published poetry worldwide in such diverse journals as Poetry Salzburg, Istanbul Literary Review, Shi Chao Poetry, Journal of Italian Translation, and Acumen. Her work has been translated into Italian, Chinese, Japanese and German. She has been nominated numerous times for the Pushcart Prize and has won awards from the Illinois Arts Council, the National Federation of State Poetry Societies, Poetry on the Lake, and other organizations. Former Vice President of the Poets Club of Chicago, her seventh and most recent collection of poems is Edges.

Live Oaks
New Orleans
​

The moss in City Park
hangs like ghost-hair,
swaying in the lukewarm wind
of ancestor breath. My grandfather

used to take us here to play,
two pale Yankee children
who needed to be gently pushed
on the old wooden merry-go-round,
to run barefoot in the grass
without mama knowing. 

Decades later, 
the park fills with new children
playing on red plastic see-saws,
their parents sipping coffee
from styrofoam cups. 

They have driven in
from gated communities
far from the riffraff of city-dwellers
and those of darker hue. During the week, 
they work in big oil, big pharma. 

They flip houses, 
forgetting the old home on Frenchman 
where Mawmaw used to live, 
now a jazz mecca on one end, 
a ghetto on the other.
They have fled to mansions 
on a golf course. 

Meanwhile, the live oaks in City Park 
hold close the aged remnants 
of trailing moss, more gray than green, 
and invisible nooses, swaying
in their century-old arms.

​

Awakening
​

Waking is a form of thanksgiving,
a prayer that doesn’t know it’s a prayer,
its identity as strong and tensile 
as the spider’s whispered web
floating over the bookcase.

Most days I’d just as soon turn over
and go back to sleep, after a lifetime
of waking before dawn, working
far into the evening, my body
resisting utter exhaustion.

Some day, if I’m lucky enough
to die in my own bed, my hands
will pluck the blankets, I’ll gurgle
a bit, eyes unblinking, seeing
something in the beyond 
clearer than the nebulous universe
of a December dawn.

Now I enter the fogged clarity
between sleep and consciousness.
The mists of autumn have evaporated 
from the soft earth, breathing hoarfrost.
The birds have vanished into winter.
Life is a muted joy. I swing
in a hammock of invisible stars.

A cold intelligence descends in the half-
light. I breathe survivor’s guilt. 
I own warmth, a roof overhead, shoes, 
a refrigerator. I can switch on a light, 
flush a toilet. I can read books on astrophysics, 
the Gnostic gospels, political turmoil. 
I can read. 

​On the Cruise

They move about the ship
with care, clinging to the rails,
wheezing over their canes,
shouting questions to each other
in carpeted elevators.

They refuse to surrender,
padding thickly on deck
if the weather’s warm,
their thin white hair
aloft in the wind. The starboard side
is “a bit slippy,” he notes.

They carry their sorrows
in the pockets of their anoraks.
They survive in the phlegm 
of their chesty coughs. Each morning
they bless a plateful of familiars--
eggs, Cumberland sausages, beans,
black pudding, toast with marmalade.

At four, after naps, 
they stir their milky tea with silver spoons,
listening to what seem like sleigh-bells
in a china cup. 
They stare into each other’s eyes 
with rheumy affection.

They do not disembark at Porto,
preferring to sit at the ship’s window 
watching those with younger knees 
scramble for sherry and trinkets.
At dinner, they order soft foods, then
go to bed early, rocked by heavy seas
into their portholed dreams. 

Polar Vortex
​

A giant cloud of icy breath
draws us together in our small house,
our pilgrim feet stilled in the daily
procession called marriage.
We are trapped within each other,
under a snowy Arctic carapace
pretending to be Chicago. Suddenly 
everything becomes irrationally quiet 
except for the odd cracking noises
from old wooden furniture, ice quakes,
bones creaking in tired flesh.

This weather has never happened before,
a phenomenon of human making 
that has closed airports, schools, libraries, 
even the post office.  It’s dangerous to breathe, 
but needing to inhale above all else, 
we hunker down, thankful at home for the pulse 
of mechanical heat that throbs like heartbeats.

We crawl under quilts, our hands finding
the pockets of faded sweaters, our hopes
camouflaged in the folds of curtains. 
When the weather warms up,
we’ll emerge from our home, 
blinking transparent smiles, waiting 
for the next cold spell. Meanwhile, 
we are thrust into hibernation, 
our mutual salvation 
endless cups of tea.

Circles
​

I heard a rabbi
on the radio talking of God,
the great Circle from which
we humans are not excluded
but dwell in our own
small circle inside.

Are we like eggs
laid by the God-woman
in a cosmic nest beyond
human making? 
Thunder will call us forth
into the galaxy of Being.

Lightning 
will illumine our vision
for one split-second 
of stellar wisdom,
the mysticism of unfulfilled
desire forever encased

in the divine. Love,
loneliness and astonishment
are our lot, ice and fire,
fact and fantasy, the benediction
of weeds and roses living together
in a secret garden, never touching.