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"When we can share, that is poetry
in the prose of life."
-- Sigmund Freud
Psyche What resonates within you?
Because of contents and histories
like branches
and roots
emanating from both ends of trunk and tree.
Your roots
buried deep exploring deep
penetrating earth. Sometimes breaking open
sewer pipes looking for water.
Sometimes cracking through
concrete sidewalks that meet our feet.
All the while your branches
reach up and out
occasionally mingling with
the branches of others.
At times alone
against
the sky where you create
your own art form your
clothes your skin
your own design and splendor then rising up out of the earth
like a man upside down
his head
buried along with outstretched arms
that become the exposed
roots of this tree--his
trunk rising up
his legs coming together
in the
air above him… Men standing
on their heads buried
to their shoulders! Above us...
imagination takes flight
where some birds build their nests
while others stop to sing.
--
Rob Marchesani, published in VIA - Voices in Italian Americana: A Literary and Cultural Review, 2009
The Secret
What I want most is to tell
but even to touch it
feels like I'm
falling
through a deep volcano's lips--and that
is the difficulty: it will not
erupt, will not rumble,
holds
its vast undersurface
still .... All I am saying
is what you have felt before,
if we should ever be known
as we are, what hideousness--
wouldn't we repel
one another in volumes
of deceit and shame?
The secret
is not that we are
this broken, this vile--but that we have hidden
what first wounded us
into
believing that.
-- Kate Knapp Johnson
Originally published in Wind Somewhere, and Shade, 2001, two-time winner
of a Gradiva Award from NAAP. Reprinted with permission.
Kate Knapp Johnson is the author of three collections of poetry, Wind Somewhere, and Shade,
When Orchids Were Flowers and This Perfect Life. A recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts Award, Johnson teaches
at Sarah Lawrence College and is in the training program at The Westchester Institute for Psychoanalysis. She lives in Mount
Kisco, New York, with her husband and children. "Kate Johnson's gift is to make the inner life so clear
and concrete as to fix a self to the page. She confronts suffering without erasing the possibility of love, or denying the
presence of joy. Distilled and direct, plain and mysterious at once, these poems involve us in moments in the work of soul-making."
- Mark Doty
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