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Salvatore Ala

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

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

Salvatore Ala

Salvatore Ala, 10 july 2013

A Time of Hard Rain


In so much rain the homeless drown,
If this rain was bullets they’d be children of massacres.
If this rain was petroleum coke we’d already be Pompeii.
If this rain was a pesticide we’d be innumerable bees
Found dead in parking lots round the world.
If this rain was plague we’d be shadows among Pharaohs.
If this rain was money we’d drink from the same well.
If this rain was food the hungry could eat their tears.
If this rain was love, hatred would dissipate like haze.    
If this rain was peace, peace would water our lands.
If this rain was rage, God would haemorrhage
From a wound at least as mortal as our own.


number of comments: 2 | rating: 5 | detail

Salvatore Ala

Salvatore Ala, 12 september 2013

Stonehenge Revisited


The earth is cradled in a grave
The sky is buried in the earth
The stones are hanging from a thread of light
And everyone here has been here before
And everyone has come a long way
And those who love meet those who hate
And those who breathe air breathe stone
And those who are fire are dust
And those who are clay shall be wine
And those who arrive meet those departing
And children find their mothers
And fathers reconcile with sons 
And the old meet themselves in the young
And the young discover a road
And round the heavenly clock time is as nothing
And we cluster for warmth
At the brief fire of a thousand years


number of comments: 4 | rating: 5 | detail

Salvatore Ala

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

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

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

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

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

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


10 - 30 - 100  


Other poems: Strip Search, Pathetic Fallacy, Natural History, The Study of Languages, Animal Horns, Anthology, Unforeseen Events, Empire Coins, Mother Son Song, Terrace Garden, Lampedusa House, Firebird Sunset, In a Gallery of Birds, The Counterweight, Journey of Life, Conversations with Men with Brain Injuries, Music Mountain, Chronicles of Man, What Angels Know, Clouds Over London, Stonehenge Revisited, Six Rooms, Kintsukuroi, A Time of Hard Rain, Incantation Bowl, America, Petroleum Coke Piles on the Detroit River, State of Grace Hospital, My America, On a Photograph of an Abandoned Southern Home, The Becoming, 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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