Running and other Poems (POESIA) ~ di Joseph Bathanti - TeclaXXI

 POESIA

 

Joseph Bathanti

 

Running and other poems

                                            immagine generata da Canva (progetto JS©2026)

Running

                                                           (For Leon)

I recite the rosary

Hail Mary when I run,

a wooden bead full of grace

per so many meters: for the winter wheat,

the Lord is with thee;

coy blessed barely green beneath

the purple art thou Lenten crown vetch;

the sun that rations color among women and blessed

sitting in its cupboard ripening

like a pomegranate is the fruit;

the frayed, porous moon of thy womb

dissolving on the tongue

of blue morning Jesus;

cows, musk of their bowels

scenting the fog, still as tintypes;

deer Holy Mary gazing skyward in wonder

at the cry of Canada geese;

papery corn shucks whispering at my feet; 

strips of loose tin from an infolded barn

thundering in the wind-lash;

my print Mother of God

alongside the raccoon's and skunk's

as I leap the creek bed

and cross Stikeleather land,

posted black letters on yellow handbills

tacked to the shaven thighs of Sycamores;

chicken houses a mile off

on Midway Road whitening in the now-

lightening horizon pray;

and far beyond in Alexander County,

on looming Fox Mountain, nectarines

that will hold migrants hostage

all spring flower.

I gulp another quart of ether,

dig for us sinners

up the steep farm road to intercept

the risen sun, sprint the crest,

my chest filled with pink shrapnel,

and fall into it,

a stretched and sweating shadowgraph.

For this searing instant  

one chases now and at the hour

in the darkness every morning

the improbability of our death

that legs with hearts to prompt them

may keep lurching, decade upon decade,

chaplet upon chaplet, toward salvation Amen.

 

[Running, by Joseph Bathanti, was previously published in Land of Amnesia, Press 53, 2009. The author extends his grateful acknowledgment]

 

Jesus Falls the First Time

He came late to walking and I fretted

lest the blue yield of my virginity

was flawed in marrow and sinew whetted

by innocence whelping Divinity.

He could speak, but refused. He knew His name,

knew Iscariot was His betrayor,

the psalter’s archive portending His fame,

had committed to memory Isaiah.

His first toys were hammer, nails, adze and awl,

His own apprentice bench from which he pitched

and split a cleft above his eye, a fall

that would have killed another child. I stitched

my pretty baby while he read a poem

about bands of angels bearing him home.

 

[Jesus Falls the First Time, by Joseph Bathanti, was previously published in Sonnets of the Cross, Jacar Press, 2013. The author extends his grateful acknowledgment]

 

Jesus Meets the Women

 

They bump into Him shopping in Bloomfield.

It’s how many years? He’s skin and bone.

The hair. The beard. Some kind of radical.

But still He shows respect, kisses each one,

inquires about their health, tells them to pray,

ask anything in His name and it’s theirs.

They laugh. He’s probably on drugs, they say.

His poor widowed mother. Thirty-three years

old, a grown man, and still can’t settle down.

The little bit He makes He gives away,

while poor Mary sits in one room downtown,

practically on welfare, day after day.

They don’t mention the thorns or bloody cross.

He’s not a bad kid, just a little lost.

 

[Jesus Meets the Women, by Joseph Bathanti, was previously published in Sonnets of the Cross, Jacar Press, 2013. The author extends his grateful acknowledgment]

 

The Tongue          

 

                                                                   And the tongue is a fire,

                                                                   a world of iniquity.       

 

                                                                   -- St. James 3:5

 

My mother used to threaten with her death.

I won't live to see this or that                              

or simply, I'll be dead. 

A child, sure I had sown her death wish,

I was terrified of these utterances.

 

But with each day,

I learned what a liar was the tongue,

how it culled vendetta,

then fell silent. Busy bricking

myself into a tomb to rival hers,

I thought, Go ahead and die,

but stop talking about it.

 

One day when she was dressing –

we had to pay bills and I was furious

about going – I turned and said

inside the ruined temple of my head,

fuck, a word, like love, I didn’t know

the meaning of, but felt like nails,

blood-real, not word-real –

like the fact of fire.

 

I'd thought I'd been talking to myself,

but the sound of that word –

cheap, weightless, thrilling –

wormed out of me in a voice

which the house over and over whispered back.

In only her underthings,

my mother wheeled, clutched for cover

a towel to her throat and breast

in a gesture I would see

astonished women forever copy.

 

Unable to deny it,

I stood outside her bedroom door,

the tip of the word still hanging

like a switchblade from my mouth.

Suddenly, to punish her for the shame I felt,

I wanted to be dead. 

I knew that clipped syllable had amounted

to the confession I had been secretly making

to myself minute by minute

every day of my life.

 

I couldn't possibly have known

all those years ago – I was just a little boy –

what that word meant.

Looking at my mother as she backed mutely

into her room and out of my life –

as if she were about to crash unclothed

through the window into the snowstorm,

leaving me once and for all –

it was clear 

she too was innocent of it.

 

[The Tongue, by Joseph Bathanti, was previously published in Restoring Sacred Art, Star Cloud Press, 2010. The author extends his grateful acknowledgment.]

Women’s Prison

 

Two Sundays a month, darkness still abroad,

we round up the kids and bundle them.

into a restored salvaged Bluebird school bus,

repainted green, and make the long haul.

 

to Raleigh where their mothers are locked

in Women’s Prison. We pin the children’s names,

and numbers to their coats, count them

like convicts at lights-out. Sucking thumbs,

 

clutching favorite oddments to cuddle as they ride

curled in twos on patched sprung benches,

they sleepwalk bashfully, the little aged,

into the belly of the bus, eyes nailed to its floor.

 

We feed them milk and juice, animal crackers, apples;

stop for them to use the bathroom,

and to change the ones so young, they can’t help wetting.

We try singing: folk tunes and strike ballads –

 

as if off to picket or march with an army of babies –

but their stony faces will not yield and, finally,

their passion to disappear puts them to sleep,

not to wake until the old Bluebird jostles

 

through the checkpoints into the prison.

Somehow, upon reopening their eyes, they know

to smile at the twirling jagged grandeur

surrounding the massive compound: concertina –

 

clotted with silver scraps of dew and dawn light,

a bullet-torn shroud of excelsior, scored

in dismal fire, levitating in the savage

Sabbath sky. By then, their mothers,

 

in the last moments of girlish rawboned glory,

appear in baggy, sky-blue prison shifts,

their beautiful hands lifting to shield their eyes,

like saints about to be slaughtered,

 

as if the light is too much, the sky suddenly egg-blue,

plaintive, threatening to pale away, the sun

still invisible, yet blinding. Barefoot, weepy,

they call their babies by name and secret endearment,

 

touch them everywhere like one might the awakened dead.

The children remain dignified, nearly aloof

in their perfect innocence, and self-possession,

toddling dutifully into the arms of anyone

 

who reaches for them, even the guards, petting them too.

When visiting hours conclude, the children hand

their mothers cards and drawings, remnants

of a life they are too young to remember,

 

but conjure in glyphic crayon blazes.

Attempting to recollect the narrative

that will guide them back to their imagined homes,

the mothers peer from the pictures to the departing

 

children – back and forth, straining

to make the connection, back

and forth until the children, already fast asleep

as the bus spirits them off, disappear.

 

[Women’s Prison, by Joseph Bathanti, was previously published in Concertina, Mercer University Press, 2013. The author extends his grateful acknowledgment]

___________________________________

JOSEPH BATHANTI

BIONOTA JOSEPH BATHANTI is the former North Carolina Poet Laureate (2012-14) and recipient of the North Carolina Award in Literature, the state’s highest civilian honor. 

The author of over twenty books, Bathanti is McFarlane Family Distinguished Professor of Interdisciplinary Education at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, and is the recipient of the Board of Governors Excellence in Teaching Award. 

He served as the 2016 Charles George VA Medical Center Writer-in-Residence in Asheville, NC, and is the co-founder of the Medical Center’s Creative Writing Program. 

His volume of poetry, Steady Daylight, from Louisiana State University Press, is forthcoming in 2026. He was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in October of 2024.