Two Poems by Robert Savino

Dust of Dreams

Dust still lives
underground
at the site.

 

Families of responders
who dug deep
into their hearts

 

find treasures of humanity
remain intoxicated
by the air,

 

the every breath of hope
that invites
doses of chemo

 

to fight shadows
spreading inside
walls of life

​

and oxygen cocktails
in shoulder-strapped
portable vessels.

​

An aura of spirits
circles the sun
sheds tears from clouds

​

passing the skyline
and in the moonlight
winks at unwavering believers.

 

 

On the Know Ledge

Prose knows how to be straightforward
arms stretched to the edge of the border
take words for a stroll without stopping
at structural walls to stub a toe
make turns, easily, in and around everyday corners.
I can digest Hemingway and a hero on my lunch hour.

 

Poetry is more formal, stands erect
seldom reaches the edge of the border.
I find some poems to grow legs at night,
want to dance, smother me in syllabic stress,
force me to back step in rhythm,
walk night streets on metric feet.

 

There I meet prose poetry . . . imagery without verse,
where boundaries blur,
looks like prose . . . reads like poetry
all things Shakespeare might stir in a cauldron

 

Double, Double
‘tis time
poetry & prose
a broth of wisdom
both charm
and boil to bubble

​

O wonderful, wonderful, As You Like It,
most wonderful wonderful
this cocoon of identity and diversity
bringing down the curtain with loud cries of excitement.

 

 

 

Robert Savino, Suffolk County Poet Laureate 2015-2017, is a native Long Island poet, born on Whitman’s Paumanok and a Board Member at the Walt Whitman Birthplace. Robert is the winner of the 2008 Oberon Poetry Prize. His books include fireballs of an illuminated scarecrow, his first collection Inside a Turtle Shell and recently published No Distance Between Us, a bilingual collection of Italian American Poets of Long Island.