I wrote this poem years ago to honor my own multi-racial, interfaith family. I’ve since reworked it to reflect my larger, worldwide family.
Thanks for taking a moment to read it.
Joann
Diversity
is
a celebration,
a continuity,
a flowing unity,
the chorus that sings:
We are valuable people.
So, arise from the depths, dear souls,
penetrate unconscious snags and sweep aside senseless predispositions.
Breathe our common air, embrace our dispossessed.
and,
assert we all stand as kin.
Half past sunrise.
The woodland mist around my house dissipates.
Damp dirt, pine, and wildflower fragrance tease my nose.
A light breeze brushes my face and the underbrush rustles.
Are forest dwellers changing shifts?
Or dryads winding down their overnight play?
A lone mourning dove sings its sorrow.
I close my eyes and contemplate my mountain home.
Gentleness and wildness,
hospitality and hostility,
mythology and reality
all meld together.
I yearn to capture this moment, keep it forever.
But I can only create a memory.
I sip my strong espresso.
Something stings my ankle. I set down my cup, swipe the culprit away, and scratch. It flies into my coffee.
I lift my camera, scan the bush through its lens.
I snap my photos and muse:
Can treetops touch the sky?
Autumn’s rainbow fades,
the Adriatic flows, and
hearts, adrift, sail home.
We
celebrate our investment in our right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,”
aspire to our “American Dream,” a home, suitable work, and a good education,
hope that each generation prospers better than the one preceding it,
pledge our commitment to “liberty and justice for all,”
strengthen our proclaimation that our government is
“of the people, by the people, and for the people,”
and,
when the barbeques, baseball games, and fireworks are over,
we remember how our country paid for it’s freedom,
review the reasons we call it home,
and reaffirm that
“we the people” have an obligation to come together as “one nation,”
and
participate in our political process
by keeping ourselves informed,
by debating our goals and principles,
and by striving toward “the will of the people.”
We Americans have been around for 237 years–not a long history within the context of measuring civilizations, but long enough to look back and review and accept who we are, what we’re really about, and how we arrived at our present place. Then, perhaps, we can ask where we want to go from here and plan politically, socially, and culturally inclusive ways to get there.
Living with passwords can lead to
ultra-slow suffocation
during our attempts at encryption.
It forces us to bundle ourselves
inside cumbersome, multi-digited
quilts stitched together with
shifting math and punctuation symbols as
we simultaneously sink deep and deeper into
our illusory, lower-case and capital letter-filled futons.
courtesy of Joann Pensabene
March 2013
The icicle descends from the roof’s overhang.
Nature’s Sculpture.
Title: Extended Chicken Leg with Attached Foot.
Given to: ME.
A parting gift from the winter that started late and outlasted its welcome.
Response: Weird, wonderful, exquisite. Unique.
My pulse soared.
I grabbed my camera and clicked.
Next day, the slow metamorphosis–
Ice. Water droplets. Condensation atop my deck’s wooden floor
swept into the windy night’s vast frost,
it’s essence,vaporized, it vanished in the warmth of yet another day’s morning sun.
Olive tree
Photo taken by Joann Pensabene in Palestine, April, 2011
Once a formless rogue in the realm of letters,
she found champions who set her in sunlight and cheered her to genre.
She rises, now, from a universal center
where intertwining roots live deep within exuberant, techno-cultural networks.
Free-flowing ideas sustain her.
Cultivated branches span time and space
as she embraces myriad premises.
Perspectives seed her soil.
Her content lives in her leaves,
and human consciousness sculpts her context.
Mother Nature
She appeared just after Hurricane Irene blew down three trees
that had sheltered her for countless years.
Melded to a birch tree, she’s a goddess in the rough,
an unrefined beauty, alive and uncultivated.
Her eyes and mouth are mushrooms filled with layers of dirt, dust,
and other hardened, natural deposits.
Her nose is a broken tree branch pointing ever skyward.
And she watches over my home in the Adirondack State Park
in upstate New York.
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