DANIELA GIOSEFFI
Daniela Gioseffi is an American Book Award winning author of eleven books of poetry and prose. Her first, Eggs in the Lake (BOA Editions: Rochester, NY.) won a New York State Council for the Arts grant award in poetry. She has also had a NYSCA grant for performance poetry and reads widely throughout the USA and Europe, often appearing on NPR or WNYC as well as other radio and TV stations. Her second and third collections, Word Wounds and Water Flowers, and Going On were published by VIA Folios/Bordighera and her latest 2002, Symbiosis, is from Rattapallax, NY. She has received excellent reviews for her poetry in many venues and from varied accomplished poets. An independent voice on the literary scene for many years, her work appears in The Cortland Review, The Paris Review, Chelsea, Antaeus, The Nation, Priarie Schooner, and Poetry East among many magazines. Her interviews with well known poets are also widely published. her American Book Award winning anthology WOMEN ON WAR: International Writings was reissued in an all new edition by The Feminist Press, NY, 2003 and has been met with exemplary reviews from BookList, Library Journal and The New York Times, as well as become the a best seller for The Feminist Press. Daniela edits www.PoetsUSA.com/ and publishes literary criticism in varied venues, i.e. Hungry Mind Review, Poet Lore, American Book Review, Rain Taxi, The Philadelphia Inquirer, etc. Her verse was inscribed in marble alongside that of William Carlos Williams and Walt Whitman on the wall of the 7th Avenue Concourse of PENN Station, 2002. Her anthology of world literature, ON PREJUDICE; A Global Perspective, from Anchor/Doubleday, NY, 1993 received a World Peace Award from The Ploughshares Fund at the United Nations, 1993. She is the author of a novel from Doubleday The Great American Belly,optioned for a screen play by Warner Bros, and, a collection of stories, In Bed with the Exotic Enemy,and has received the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award, as well. Daniela is a Planetary Citizen who believes in the "Gospel of Earth" as Vandana Shiva of India calls it.
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NATURE
No such thing as bad weather,
only different kinds of good weather.
Poor urban landscapes wound eyes with smoke,
dust, stench, garbage and an over abundance of bubonic rats
feed on dog shit to be killed by blessed cats.
Tess of the Durbervilles walks through a sunny field
attuned to serenity, and is later caught in wind tunnels of tragedy.
Pathetic fallacy has it's truths to 19th Century writers like Thomas Hardy--
when moods match weather, sunshine uplifts,
soothing rain refreshes better than cola
zephyrs embrace, snow thrills more than a horror movie.
Travelling through cycles of sunset, sunrise, and season,
spring and winter are metaphors for youth and age.
Winds kiss our cheeks on their way around the globe grazing other cheeks.
Our home is in us, and we are in Her. Like the soft body of a snail in its shell,
we respond to Her glories without speaking or by reciting subtle poems
of Her wonders wherein miracles
and disasters happen all the time, the stuff of human art
since its dawning.
We open our senses to feel Her grandeur:
sequoia gigantia is greater than any cathedral
and sprouts from a tiny seed cone.
Delicate swirls
are ground into shells and pearls
by brute force of ocean whirls.
We pass with unseeing eyes.
If we'd never seen a tree, we'd notice a forest.
If we knew we'd never see a rose again,
we'd stop to smell it.
If we lived always under clouds,
we'd hold out my hands to feel sunbeams.
Trace the interlacing web of a spider
holding an August wind--
a thread stronger, pound for pound, than steel.
Atmospheric balance is sheer poetry.
Animals born of mud breathe oxygen
granted by vegetation. Trees and plants breathe
our carbon dioxide and give back their oxygen for our breath!
I thrill at the phenomenon of photosynthesis, poetry of creation.
Greenery stands in the sunlight
and through chemical process of cloroplasts, creates energy,
food, glucose,
fructose by which we live and the trees survive
in a linked chain which binds us to all.
Down in dark roots,
all flowers keep light.
Birth, life, and death-
happen on the hidden side of leaves.
Every grain of sand holds earth's stories
A leaf of grass
contains light years of stars.
We are made of the stuff of stars!
How strange and wonderful this round home,
swirling vaporous atmosphere,
flowing with frozen liquids,
trembling with plants and the love making
of creeping, crawling, climbing creatures,
croaking things with wings
hanging from rocks, feathers soaring through fog,
furry grasses, scaly seas, gliding wet flesh
as the man fits into the woman to explode with seed
to ova reborn as earth rebirthed.
Every fact of her a new word
rightly seen, taken all together into a universal book.
(E=Mc2) making all natural brothers and sisters of Her
in death and birth.
Walking fields of summer buzzing with happier note
leads us to intricate connections of biospheric diversity.
Watching winged migration makes us fear skies
empty of bird song.
Worlds below brine show us sea changes:
our impact as harvesters on the lives of mighty oceans.
Sea breeze casts a spell that holds us in its net of wonder-not always
blue. Often dazzled by bright waves that feel the bottom, crest, topple
release a phosphorescent surf of pale green, yellow or red hue.
Advancing surf glows, stuns like lightning across skies,
leaves a rainbow on the curved horizon.
The sea has many voices. Lend the surf your ears
and hear in it a world of music: hollow boomings and heavy roars,
big watery tumblings trampling long hissing seethes,
sharp, rifle-shot reports, splashes, whispers, grinding undertones
melodies, harmonies, dissonant voices of people in the sea
talking to me.
I dream my own report of what they speak
as eye witness to the vista taken for granted,
shared in communion
articulated by poetry. Stars scribble frosty sagas in our eyes
filled with the gleaming cantos of unvanquished space,
the unspeakable awe of astronomical heavens.
Emotions motivate science to understand,
to preserve the treasures which sustain our very lives.
Humankind is always partly of a future,
we possess a power to shape.
Whatever link of Nature we strike, tenth or ten thousandth,
breaks the chain alike. She does nothing uselessly.
A seed hidden in the heart of an apple is an invisible orchard.
Symbiosis as the very crux of the matter of life woven together
as organic edification. Animals more finished and complete,
gifted with extensions of the senses
we have lost or never attained,
living by voices we shall never hear.
They are not breathren,
they are not underlings;
they are other nations,
caught with ourselves
in the net of time, fellow prisoners
of the splendor and struggle.
Worlds can be found looking down
under the grass stems
or at the skittering crabs in a tidal pool
as rain falls upon the earth
and plants and forests
bearing fruit come
exquisitely into sweet forms
from liquid skies.
Nature has manure
and She has muddy roots and wormy toes
as well as blossoms and I can't hate the merd
and blame the roots for not being roses--
my body root my souls to a greater design,
voiding the repulsion of civilization.
Urbanized humans have a dangerous self-hatred
of their own bodies excretions
--as greed pours back on us at the brink of our own extinction
an utter pillaging of our bounty.
We saunter in rising sun.
In beauty, we stride to the travelling sun.
In loveliness, we dance to the sunset.
In splendor, we run through elegance.
In affinity, we walk the earth, Our Mother.
We must take care of Her,
sacred with every step we take.
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EARTH SONG
We are eyes
of leaves, ears of mud.
We see sunset and rise.
Hear bird songs and wind sighs.
We are eyes
born of the sea.
We are living souls of Her.
In Her womb
there are no nations.
Her children are one rainbow of light.
We yield to Her.
We are the prism of Her sight.
We breathe the breath
of one universal
ball of blue water
--one home to all of us.
She is the Mother of All.
She bears the son,
and is daughter and lover
to everyone born of Her seas;
there are no enemies!
The seed dies to be born in fruit.
What is the life of a flea?
The meaning of a flower?
That it be, as we,
all of Her mud and seas and seeds
Blossoming, blooming wondrously
from fingers, roots, swamps, trees,
we are the eyes of leaves!
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BIG BLUE BALL WET WITH SUN
The mind wanders in darkness
more than sunlight--
a rodent searching garbage in sewers it
dreams up torture, rape and incest
plucks the grape, picks the flower, pokes the eyes
with fire, has nightmares full of moon fear,
wanders into itself where it blows itself to nuclear dust,
but in sunlight,
it turns to leaves green and wet with willful life--
food for children's lips, sings rhymes
as a mother puts baby to breast--
slime and mud make dreams of love
as hands crawled from fertile filth,
slithered from fish-hood into music--fins cut water in a dance, wings
slice air with flight--eyes wonder, genitalia flower
into children,
as ours when we blossom to give children back to ourselves
as just now we made love and rose from the rumpled bed
to close our separate dreams, mine full of vases and songs,
and cooking pots always needing to be scrubbed,
yours of guns and fishing rods, trains, boats and planes
that escape the womb, leave the room and fly
above the big blue-green wet ball of sun,
white frothing water
round like a pregnant belly, explodes as tadpoles, semen, bullets stream, careen,
scream through water, through air
to target where the knife slips into flesh and the wound bleeds life from water
and we come to being--
sea, hear, touch, smell--
red, blue, yellow, white, black,
primary, primal, primate
again and again
recreating death as we live and burn
in contrast, perception, conception,
flowers germinate regenerations, gene pools mesh,
strive toward the white holes of space, sucked
into dark, spun again into light ever expanding
mind-- concave, convex souls,
craniums of an Einstein or Curie,
psyches breathe light into matter and burn back
again into dark where imagination flourishes intricate devices
to make pain boil in vulnerable flesh--
museums fill with war machinery, weapons to melt away
or be left when manufactured germs, bombs and chemicals synthesize--
destroy flesh and leave a tall steel silvery missile glistening in the sun ,erect
with the dream of fire stolen by Prometheus--his liver pecked to drunken rot--
nothing standing but the missile in the sand-- monument to all burning love, lips,
fingers, hands and thumbs,
gelatinous pearls that "sea-change into something rich and strange"--
murdered by mind that cannot understand itself and wanders dreaming in the dark
from which it burst to sun--
hydrogen molecules spun
into water, life and light--
fire that dies, coals that cool as green trees reach
up to eat light, make food for sucking mouths
from mammalian factories of milk--helpless mother love forces
procreation from troubled mind-- Father, God suspicious with hate
enough to blast all creation to nothing--
on the brink of a collective will
fights it technocratic imagination
that can brilliantly kill the rose,
or plant the tree,
child,
egg that hatches into bird,
word
that in the beginning
named itself
"word..."
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WHAT THE POET'S SOUL SANG AS BOMBS FELL
OVER A FAR OFF CITY LIKE HER OWN
I can't sing of spring.
I can't hear spring.
I can't see spring
because my country bombs
babies to bloody pulp
with my hard-earned taxes.
I can't smell spring,
I can't long for spring,
I can't love in spring,
because my land is grabbed
by greedy madmen horny
for orgasms of death.
And the tanks guzzle oil advancing
to fight for oil for their guzzling
and bombers and tanks use tons of gallons
every minute.
Billions of dollars of bombs burst exploding dust
as children starve, here and around the round earth,
pregnant with lust and pain
as if it were an absolute must
that bombers fill the air like sleek pterodactyls
built by our leader's campaign funded
by the very companies who sell the bombs
and make the bombers
as he wages war
on children, mothers, fathers
who die in glossy Pentagon words,
"Collateral Damage!"
How excited the newsmen are!
How thrilled the Secretary of War is!
How officious the generals explaining the machinery.
How righteous and calm the president acts!
How their voices vibrate with the thrill of massacre
as "the rockets red glare
and the bombs bursting in air
give proof through the night
that their flag is still there--"
waving its brute force over the
weak, sick, and poor
enslaved under the American-made
"Butcher of Bagdad" -a bloody cad
who lives on somewhere with his billions
as Bagdad babies die--
and every spring flower opening
against the West wind is sad
for spring has entered the CAPITOL
spending our capital
walking on gigantic steel feet
and spitting fire into the balmy air.