JOANNE MONTE

Collateral Damage

I

Throughout the city, ashes cling to the shawls

of mothers bundled with children

fleeing the shards of glass that will rip open

the flesh and the bone.  Here there is no sign

of resistance. Charred bricks quickly

head down to where flowers are slumped

in their beds, struggling without light to rise,

to breathe, to turn away.  Factories stand

on street corners where homeless men squat

inside their shadows: broken, torn, huddled in ruin. 

Where the sun has gone down, the stucco walls

of one old house crumbles like dried baby’s-breath;

a cradle is pulled out where an infant

had been sleeping, cuddled in smoke. 

The air bursts with cries instead of concession—

it was not a safe house for terrorists, 

no open arms display.  Simply a home—

our home and theirs. Behind the house,

where sensors detected hot metal,

a charcoal grill burns a hole in the ground;

the snowball bush vigorously shakes

its tight-fisted pom-poms; and the launcher,

meant to provoke attraction, stands uncertainly,

finding within its borders a more formidable opponent.

II

In the field on the other side of daylight,

a young boy and his sister are learning

to take wing, their lithe bodies

caught in the glimmer, their feet scathed

and bleeding through crushed glass,

through a slaughterhouse of fractured bones. 

It is late to try to imagine anything sacred

in this field that was once a village. 

The altar stands alone amid the ruins;

the pulpit, in painful silence.

Where there was a shrine, the young boy

picks up a cross barely clinging to the body

of Christ. This is the soul of my father.

His sister, a yellow star. And this, my mother.

Across the field, an impetuous outburst

takes place at the border the children

cannot outrun; blades of grass shoot up

like prongs, and the earth stiffens with age,

with wilderness instead of grace. 

A Curfew

When the city darkens,

it begins—curfew pulled over us

like a tarpaulin. Hands, dry and cracked

on the clock, point out that it’s time—the end;

and the beginning

when our children must burrow down

like cicada in the early stages of life. 

Early as well for young men and women

to crawl into dungeons, for the seams

on their garments to split down their backs. 

It's not unfounded—this metamorphosis,

that brief moment of reprieve

before we must emerge from the dead

into that outer husk of darkness,

crawling on our knees to find fruit,

bread, water, an iridescent wing,

when we know that our bones could be crushed

like weeds into the soil.  And yet,

it will be reported that nothing has happened. 

Nothing will have changed in fact.

All that will become entombed

is the breathing, constant, suffering silence.

Many of Joanne Monte’s poems have been published in literary journals, namely Poet Lore, The Washington Square Review, and Sixfold, among others.  Last year she was awarded a New Jersey Council on the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. She is also the recipient of numerous literary awards, including Sixfold Poetry Award, Palette Poetry Award, The Jack Grapes Poetry Award and the New Millennium Writings Award. The poems were published by the Bordighera Press in 2013.

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