To A Young Poet

___--for Max, graduating from high school, 1989

As if the body were not a space set alight from the dark,
glow on hand, smile on song, a house of kindness
in a sea of Bosch delights, and possible pastorals,
you tell me that you have been in deep despair of late

as if life were not too short to bother ending it
before our breathless fate.

What empathy I feel remembering the depressions of my youth,
the ones that still come to me, too,
when corpses rot on battlefields and living pictures of the dead
tortured out of breath and bread
and truth, make me feel that all's nothing worn through
to the brim, grim and ugly in waste and hate,
and so I think of death as comfortable sleep
that would free me from the search to be free
and the hope to be all that I know I could be
in a better world on earth.
In this life of hard knocks and Fort Knox, Max--
in this country of commercials with sleek cars
speeding people isolated in glass bubbles, burning fossils,
and twenty brands of animated toilet paper in pastel colors
singing tunes of who is softer to each other in televisionland
of computers and plutonium waste, strontium ninety
and biological warfare spreading laboratory germs,
hypocrisy of Hippocratic Oath,
in this sea of tennis courts and deadly soccer games, football fields
and bullfights, thugs called el presidente, democracy for the rich
who hire death squads to stab and rape children, Calcutta, Tangiers
and New York throbbing with Trumps, and S & L thievery of the people
by the rich, and drug dealers, swelling prisons, plagues
and pillagers, in this garbage heap of dying beggars and waving grain
full of dioxin, nukeport porkbarrels and real estate boondoggles,
profiteers of death, carbon fluorides,
styrofoam and mass murderers, we need you
to sing your special song,

the one you were created to bring as the only you
who has ever been uniquely you
in all the sin you see around you,
there is only one you to point the way, differently from every
other pained and troubled poet who has lived
in the maddening gyre lost from the falconer's call.

Max, we need you to say
how beautiful and terrible, how like blooming roses
or spilled oil on the backs of rotting otters,
or whales frolicking in song or dying dolphins,
how astounding and awful, how blue and white
the clouds are to you.
Time for each of us is
so very short and always has been--
and there are the blind or crippled who find the courage
against all odds to go on making poetry
and you are whole and beautiful in body
strong and bright in spirit,
a sensitive soul come forth from the spark of your father
in the womb of your mother
who loves you and needs you to go on
as son, a young man growing toward the time of fatherhood,
the greatest blessing of this haunting life ahead.
Think how your children to be are longing to be with you
here to see all the wonders of this glistening planet
swirling in the sun, twirling with frolic
and fun for baby beings, kittens, puppies,
your human son or daughter waiting to see, feel,
touch, taste, hear all the songs to be sung and resung
all the love to be felt, all the orgasmic gifts to be given,
still waiting to explode like opening carnations
from the groin of what's to come
still ahead, a puzzling poignant and thrilling
adventure waiting for you to live it--
full of spring thunderstorms
and winter crystals
chilled like sparkling diamonds,

hot as hells and cool as calm the days will come,
some brilliant, full of wheat and ferns,
some grey with dull clouds and clods of drooping ivy --
friends who burn out before they taste of fate--
like sands pounded by relentless seas.

We need you with us, a new poet coming up the ladder to peek
beyond the peaks and live and thrill to give life back to life,
recycling flesh to flesh,
song on hand, hand on smile,
the body a space set alight from the dark
an orchid waiting to be all that you may be
before greed
steals the forests from the rain,
the leaves from the sun,
on this, perhaps the only teardrop of love set to laughter,
to sight, touch, taste, smell, sound--
this small round planet of perceptions
in silent space, full of contrasts,
joys unknown except through sorrow, spinning with you on board
where we need you, one more unique pair of eyes and ears
telling us to live on
as long as we can breathe,
as long as we can seethe with love
and share words
as symbols of all we hope to be,
all we might become
with you a part of the sum
letting death come when it comes
and not before the small space
of time set aside for you to join the race
with arms to hug and hold, lips to sing,
tongue to taste, eyes and hands to write and right,
heart to believe beyond all doom
that there is still a little room for hope
that thing with feathers perched and chirping out
at least a sparrow's tune of peace,
perhaps a nightingale's subtle song
undoing some of the wrong, convincing light and color to go on
in you and us,
one more voice to sing the body electric,
to celebrate yourself with us, poets who
have often known the suicidal pain--a refrain
of lost hope, a dirge that strains to strangle in the throat
choked all to nothing--
except that, Max, you have the will
to thrill with binding spell, avoiding fateful visions
of catastrophe, dreaming of survival, beyond nuclear nightmares,
brave with fears, looking the tiger in the eye,
a maker of the change still within range
of possible futures full of rain forests replanted
and throbbing with flowers, birds and words
sung against the dark, rescued whales and otters,
your own spark to come unto the spark of her,
the woman of this earth born now and waiting to find you,
the father to her mother, the brother to her sisterhood, a man
to her womanhood, the singer who will share her melody until
its done, your life is just begun.
She needs you to protect her--blue and dancing round the sun,
wet with rain and oceans, tears, fears full
of poetry and trees, she's somewhere waiting
on her knees, a prayer that you'll find her whispers in her night,
she wants you to give her back to herself,
to share the mystery until she's blooming with new seed,
a new spring unsprung, a life like your own life,
asking you to be kind to her, to life herself, to triumph
with her over profiteers and greed. When you are sad, Max,
remember her need of you. She is somewhere now,
lonely without you, waiting for you to come to her, to find her and live
like flowers that have bloomed from graves with her.

Shadow

Grinning at me in the mirror
of the window this morning
came a shadow
with teeth.

The same one
who tonight comes
as the sun sets--
bringing in its warm hands
a bouquet of orchids
each with a throat
singing plaintively,

and from each throat shines a wet eye
imploring, "We are your dreams;
why haven't you lived us?"

But my lips are too wrinkled
to answer with song,
and so the shadow
stands before me
bereft with her offering.
And so we celebrate and grieve
the gifts we are given
always in transiency
forever a mystery
to ourselves
as we learn who we are
by measuring
our lost dreams
until dreaming
is done
and the sun
finally
sinks
beyond the curve
of Earth
our only Mother
who must devour us
to let new shadows,
carriers of flowers,
live.

___ -- Daniela Gioseffi


Daniela Gioseffi, author of ten books of poetry and prose, won the American Book Award, 1990 for editing Women On War: International Voices for Survival in the Nuclear Age, and a Ploughshares Fund World Peace Award, 1993, for Prejudice: A Global Perspective. Her latest books of poems are Going On and Word Wounds & Water Flowers (Via Folios @ Purdue U., 1999 & 95) and her latest volume of fiction is In Bed With The Exotic Enemy: Stories & Novella, 1997. She's winner of a PEN Short Fiction Award and two New York State Council on the Arts Grants in Poetry. Gioseffi edits Wise Women's Web and Skylands Writers, two Literary E-Zines. She has published for over thirty years in such magazines as The Paris Review, Antaeus, The Nation, The Hungry Mind Review, Prairie Schooner, American Book Review and many others.

Acknowledgement: Copyrighted (C) 1999 by Daniela Gioseffi. All rights reserved by the author.