October Poetry Monday: Joan Peronto

October Poetry Monday: Joan Peronto

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Joan Peronto

Joan Peronto is an emerging poet it gives me great pleasure to introduce.  Her poems thus far have appeared only in a number of small publications and in Crossing Paths, an anthology of Western New England poets, but we will be hearing more of her.  Currently, after raising seven children who are now, as she tells us “educated and thrust upon the world,” and after working for thirty-four years as a reference librarian, she has retired to devote herself to poetry.  Her new and soon-to-be-realized project is a collection of poems about a small Midwestern town, similar to the one in which she grew up.

                                                                              Irene Willis   
                                                                              Poetry Editor

 

 Hearing the Stones

In a forgotten corner
of the graveyard,
granite gleams
in rainlight,
ravens congregate
in crooked pines.
Here lie soldiers,
widows, preachers,
farmers, idlers,
a scattering of saints.
Under tangled
berry bushes
and wild lilies
thin stones
lean together,
talking.
We walked the cratered path
ever dreading the black river
at its end.
Breathe easy, traveler.
At river’s edge
there is a bridge.

Zion

Obediently,
day flows
into the canyon.

Silver-grey
before the stones
burn red.

Shaman
lifts his flute.
First breath for God.

Diaspora

No candles flicker
at the feet of saints.
By order of the Bishop,
the doors are locked
at Holy Family Church,
altar stripped of crucible,
bells silent, thurifer unlit.
The old women have vanished.
Not allowed to die,
they have ascended to the rafters,
black shawls trailing,
whispering prayers in Polish
for children, husbands.
Inconsolable that here and now,
bread is only bread,
wine is only wine.