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Poetry

	Salvatore Ala
	PROFILE About me Friends (6) Books (1) Poetry (40) Photography (1)

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Salvatore Ala, 10 august 2012

Cryptozoology

Our research points to terrifying conclusions,
Cryptids don’t exist but we believe in them.
We spawn marine reptiles in our minds.
We descend like Andean wolves, into the lower forests.
It might as well be that skunk-ape migrants of global warming
Indicate their degrees in theology.
It might as well be that being is bizarre,
Monsters of the lector unsolved in the sermon.
It might as well be that Chupacabras
Are devil dogs stirring the furnace of souls.
Perhaps a pharmaceutical apocalypse
Creates the condition for a mutant menagerie.
All we can say beyond a reasonable doubt:
They are the varmint of the malcontent
Who have peopled else, and are on the move.

number of comments: 3 | rating: 2 | detail

Salvatore Ala, 6 july 2012

Crow Feather Totem

I saw a crow’s feather on the road
And the sun shining in that precise shape.
I was drawn to a crow’s feather on the road
Until I was far from home.
I found a crow’s feather on the road
Like a murder of crows born of nothingness.
I picked up a crow’s feather
And turned into my shadow.
I carried the crow’s feather home
And my awareness was lifted.
I brought the feather home
And the power went out.
I placed it over my hawk’s feather
And night covered day.
My totem grew to include owl and raven.
Now my shadow has wings,
No one takes this journey but me.

number of comments: 0 | rating: 1 | detail

Salvatore Ala, 28 june 2012

Ellis Island

Passenger ships slip time in fog,
Their displacement forever in motion.
At Ellis Island multitudes materialize
In sackcloth and ashes.
As they pass, our ancestors
Smile at us in pity and in wonder.

number of comments: 0 | rating: 3 | detail

Salvatore Ala, 18 may 2012

Kiwanis Music Finals

The practice area is like an orchard of sound
Where you pick notes as they ripen
And those that fall seed the ground.

You can harvest grapes from this vine
That grows along the staff of time
Following the sun into drums of wine.

The pianos seem near and far
Like conversations behind doors
Or rain on the roof of your car.

The practice area is a paradise
Where even angels clash
And beauty is soundly imprecise.

Please listen to the children play,
Their music is so unaffected
You’ll hear the origins of rhapsody.

number of comments: 1 | rating: 4 | detail

Salvatore Ala, 10 may 2012

Young Love in Ancient Place

I’ll share this photograph of my parents with you.
It’s like an old wine overflowing time, still new.
They’re eighteen and twenty-four, in their best poor clothes,
Posing under an olive branch on a Roman road.
The picture is classically imbued; they, permeated
By natural light like actors in a neorealist film
Embraced in some final frame of desperate justice.
The photograph arrests the wind of the day, that moment,
Blowing blades of blurring grasses into living inertia,
Light pregnant even in the stones and shadows;
And there’s something more, something magical,
Beyond youth and beauty, a divinity being born,
Cupid bending the olive branch, the arrow flown.

number of comments: 0 | rating: 4 | detail

Salvatore Ala, 9 march 2012

The Blue Hour

Neither complete reason or revelation
But falling in love again when we can’t help it
Ambient composite blue transparent to the stars
Between dawn and sunrise sunset and dusk
Constellations swirl in blue-ringed octopus spheres
Between cerulean and cobalt a painted sky
Something levels like the height of waters
Cityscapes hang in Krishna heavens
A mirror’s blue velvet tumbles to the floor
Night sways in the white sheers of a blue room
Unfinished wine drinks the rose of night
Music trickles the ether of afterglow
The blue hour ebbs from the earth's shadow
We are strangers in the space of a window

number of comments: 4 | rating: 4 | detail

Salvatore Ala, 29 february 2012

Two Moon Matching Set

1
Moon in Tiffany setting with gypsy lights
And girdle of gold opalescence,
But rarely like this, cupped in cloud-stone,
Out of dark velvet night
This earthshine of all beauty;
Altered stone, at the angle of incidence,
Basalt glazed and ringed in space
With a lustre priceless and enduring,
Because in minimum of magnitude
All star-points gleam alike,
And time is richer by one jeweled night.

2
Shadows at full moon are deeper than meanings.
They embody fullness, erase space,
Build mass and edifice in mind and place.
The mystery behind history, opposing peripheries,
These silhouettes of branches and trees,
A phantom nursery, lunar forest,
Buried trees swimming up from the subsoil
As though through a lake of black glass.
Earth in earth, universe in universe,
Branches rupturing the stars
And we, fortunate to walk among them.

number of comments: 0 | rating: 5 | detail

Salvatore Ala, 26 december 2011

Sea Dreams

how the sea learned to walk on so many legs where the seashell began
compiling its manual how coral disguised itself in itself how jellyfish
learned erudition how the octopus engineered fluidity where the flower
was born and the tree where the root went down how branches branch why
leaves need to grow when the eye of God became a fossil of meaning where
time began work on its museum how the dragonfly was invented how
spiders of crystal learned to cooperate in the mineral kingdom when the
seed discovered its shape in the word love how birds learned to sing
through bone why why is the smallest seashell the faintest star

number of comments: 0 | rating: 5 | detail

Salvatore Ala, 26 december 2011

The Painter After a Stroke

Half the loft in darkness,
Half the flowers watered,
Daylight shines halfway across the floor
Like a line he drew
With a yellow marker.

Half his mail unopened,
Half his cat visible,
One speaker crackles in and out,
A spark of recognition
Comes and goes.

He smiles like a canvas
With a middle margin,
And pointing to a window
Beside his easel
Perfect halves meet.

number of comments: 1 | rating: 6 | detail

Salvatore Ala, 26 december 2011

In the Beauty of a Lower Heaven

Autumn in Paris is like summer in a lower heaven.
Sycamores and chestnuts paint the air,
Pencil-thin branches sketch the city like Utrillo,
The Seine sets leaves in moon-glass.

We caught the metro at Bir-Hakeim
Near Vel’ d’Hiv, the Nazi detention center.
Cyclists went flying into fire and ash
In the beauty of a lower heaven.

Something grotesque in the accordion
Like a fascist playing Mozart.
Something hypnotic in the sound,
The bellowing of giving birth to terror.

In the beauty of a lower heaven
All the people are lovelier, tranquil,
Even at rush hour music tames
The writhing beast of megalopolis.

Goodnight Paris, bonne nuit,
Your accordions are like history
Repeating the music and the horror
In the beauty of a lower heaven.

Goodnight Roseline, Simone and Eliana…
We will meet again, Aviva…
The doors of the trains are opening
In the beauty of a lower heaven.

number of comments: 0 | rating: 5 | detail

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Latest items:

Poetry

Cryptozoology

Crow Feather Totem

Ellis Island

Kiwanis Music Finals

Young Love in Ancient Place

The Blue Hour

Two Moon Matching Set

Sea Dreams

The Painter After a Stroke

In the Beauty of a Lower Heaven

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