Just Like That

To be alive today
while the whole world is crumbling
makes one start to wonder . . .
how much time is left?

I know I'm not alone
in thinking this
and the possibility . . .
that some of us might even survive.

Still, I contemplate the end
and how it might come
while we're mowing lawns
and cooking dinner.

I'm here, just being myself and breathing
kind of like the children, that morning,
playing on the sunny shore, when just . . . like . . . that
the monstrous Tsunami reared and took their lives away.

It would be foolishness
to watch for signs of doom
and wasting precious time . . .
when you and I both know the end will come, no matter
just . . . like . . . that!

Joanne Cucinello © 2011

Behind Closed Doors

Out in the street
chalk lines, half-erased,
echo a child's brief laughter.

A rag doll
once her bedtime friend
lies faceless in an empty lot
waterlogged by endless rain.

Behind closed doors
a mother plays a deadly game
full of smiles and flashing eyes.
Two years of baby hugs quite enough now
~ for the young and beautiful.

Behind closed doors
the muffled cries that no one heard
cries that no one listened for
except the toys ~ who were her only witness.

Pictures on the evening news
flash across the screen tonight. . .
A precious package found. . .
broken, torn and dirty
food for animals,
strewn like treats among debris
pieces of a stranger's child
we knew not ~

~ Yet we mourn together
this little life
as if she were our own.


Joanne Cucinello
2009

Stained Glass Reflection

The repetition of a long lost mantra
sits on the wall of a church
calling minds to enter
and not question.

Yet, these are different days.
We, the people, do question
and are ready
with stones in hand

to smash the icons that
no longer represent
the truth of our lives
and the joy
of our new found freedom.

Joanne Cucinello 2009

Even As We Sleep

I sit and peer long
into the dark night sometimes
wondering how it is that those of us
who do not live in constant fear
can sleep assured that somehow we will wake
to see the sun rise in the east come morning
even while those who are the hunted
never make it through the night.

Somehow yet, we manage to sleep secure
beneath our blankets, while far across the seas
the Hunters stomp through darkened streets
smashing doors and windows
pulling out the innocents with lies.

Unannounced they come and take them
dragging through the night in terror
locking them away on cold dirt floors
with filth and excrement for their beds
their blood stained garments torn for sheets.

We live so disconnected, and still the nightmares come
horrors traveling across the globe.
We hear of things like this and shake inside.
It looms so dark, this paralysis, this inability
to make it stop

and so we yearn to find that land called Camelot
praying that the visions of their pain will go away,
that somehow God would wield His mighty sword
and slay the merciless, strike them down!

But no, He does not come this night . . .
they scream and we are helpless
knowing that this brutal sin was born with Cain
and someday he could find us too.
Will you and I become the hunted next?

Joanne Cucinello 2011

Lazarus, Come Forth

I originally posted this Narrative Poem in 2010 . . . recirculating for new readers.



He comes for me, my friend, my brother, but I am four days dead in this tomb.
The weeping of my sisters, their pleading and tears, has pulled him to this place
where my flesh already rots behind the stones. I can hear him weeping too.
Why does he weep? He promised me eternal life. Why does he weep, this God-man
when he said I will be with him in Paradise?
Can it be that Paradise is not enough to quench the thirst for human touch?
Can it be that this earth has become the desire of angels? That man himself has swallowed heaven and it is . . . no more?
I have not yet passed beyond the veil, even as the light called me to move on.
I have waited on my sisters' pleas to "stay until he comes." And now he comes, parched from the dust of his journey. He comes now, his sandals worn, his hair bleached by the sun and stands before the stones, his voice roaring like that day he commanded the waves to cease for Peter. Only once, he says it "Lazarus! . . . Come Forth!!"
and I feel his breath irradiate the stones that house me in. My whole being shakes with terror as my iced heart begins to warm and pump. . . My blood flows red again!
Oh . . . I hold my ears; you are no longer my friend, rousing me from my dark sleep, bringing me back to only die once more! Have you no pity? No mercy?
I rise . . . I am alive! I see my own hands move before my face in the dim light of this tomb. I rise . . . I walk again with shuffled feet out into the blinding sun. I reach for him and stumble. So many are there, crying with my sisters, but all I see is eyes . . . his eyes, and the hand that reaches out to me. Somehow he needs me, I know not why, but he still needs me.
The day would come and it did, when he, who raised me from the dead, would be nailed on a cross to die. And in his silent painful suffering, I would hear those words again. . . "Lazarus . . . Come Forth!" And I, the one he raised from death, would go to him with these hands that live again, and touch and hold his broken feet and look into his dying eyes and give to him my human touch. The Son of God . . . who rules the stars and all the heavens. . . no more to live in human flesh, no more to walk the earth or feel the wind blow through his hair. "Lazarus, Lazarus, one last touch before Paradise."

Joanne Cucinello 2007

Slow Down

How many
days will we waste?

How many
nights will we spend
talking to cobwebs on the ceiling

sighing . . .

"Tomorrow is another day"?

And how many times will we go
from house to car
and car to work
then back again at night

never once stopping
to look at the evening sky . . .
never pausing . . . to take a conscious breath?

Just rushing on to the next moment
without lifting our heads

to gaze at the stars and the moon
that fill the sky with silent light

waiting, waiting . . . to bless us.

Joanne Cucinello 2010

This Is True

Some things are not for sale
like the moon in the sky
and the shadows of the trees
the laughter of a child
and a grandmother's hand.

Some things are not for sale
and never will be
for we hold them in our hearts
and they ride like the wind
free for all who breathe.

Some things are not for sale
like the spark in a lover's eyes
and the truth of a well lived life
the beauty of the smoky hills at sunset
and the sound of the lark.

Some things are not for sale
they belong to us all
without price to pay or barter
they are the gifts of the Giver
and they make us shine.

Joanne Cucinello 2010

Life Is Love

Life is so fragile
we are all waiting to be born
and held forever
in the palm of God

Life is so beautiful
we've been given a heart
that beats the time
for all who've come before
and all who have been promised

Life is soul magnetic
attracting, holding fast
the good and bad of humankind
the very best and worst of us

Life is purely gift
forgiving one creation, leaping to another
to please the smiling God whose
only dream is love.

Joanne Cucinello 2010

The Clothesline

It’s sweet nostalgia
come to visit me today
bringing me to Brooklyn streets
and brownstones with their backyard lines
childhood thoughts of neighbors
hanging wash
tattle tales and peekaboos
hung dripping on the line.
Minny’s see-through underwear
and Bobby’s holey socks
Alice wears a bra now . . .
can you believe it?

Soon the winds will grow too cold
for hanging clothes
but still . . .
I might just do it one day, anyhow
just to see
the frozen stiffs come off the line
remembering
the laughter in our kitchen then
when my Mom pulled them one by one
hard and cold
through the window . . .
clothesbodies
waiting to lie down
on toasty radiators
and dream away defrosting.

And I, waiting too
to sniff the crisp winter’s air
that floated through that place
filling little heads with happy memories
times too easily forgotten
in a world gone electric.

Joanne Cucinello
(written in 1988)

Hidden

Layers crust the earth and rocks
hiding what the chisel knows.
Time marks trees with circled rings
the proof of their existence.

We dig and chip away
hoping we will find somewhere
in the root of our beginnings . . .
that moment
that one glorious moment
when the first Being stood and
shouted to the stars . . ."Aha"!!
and knew that there was more.

We will not find that moment
in our diggings anywhere,
nor in any rock or tree recorded
No . . .
that sound,
that first illumination
did not plant itself beneath his feet.

It traveled, racing
through the stars of the great night sky
straight across the heavens
and there it found
beyond the darkness waiting . . .
the wild expectant heart of God!


Joanne Cucinello 2010

October Song

Vibrant crystal days
of autumn sunshine
lift my spirits once again
and call me past my window
to the color feast outside.
There's no place like
New England in the fall!

Crisping furls of frenzy
decorate the path
before me as I walk
and breathe my life today.
"Let go . . . Let go"
say the trees.

They are giving up
their leaves again
the verdant gift
and canopy of shade
I welcomed so this
summer.

Now with brilliant
sunlit tones of fire
the leaves begin their litany
of au revoirs with beauty
unrivaled even
by their birth in spring.

Toppling swirls burst and
crunch beneath my happy feet
ignoring the fact that
soon enough I'll wake bedraggled by
the thought of digging out those
long toothed rakes growing
cobwebs in the shed.

Joanne Cucinello 2009

Yours To Live

Flesh and blood are we . . .

from your beginnings in my womb,
flesh and blood are we.
Marked and linked forever, our DNA
the signature that binds us
not erasable, you and I . . . my child.

Flesh and blood are we . . .

tinged with colors handed down
from those who came before us
a pool of genes translucent
a miracle in the making.

My flesh and blood, my heart . . .

even though our eyes see differently,
even though you dance a different dance
and what you yearn for I can't see.
Your precious life is yours to live . . .
as even I did mine.

Joanne Cucinello 2010

We Can Only Wonder

When we read about the torture of other human beings, their deprivation and humiliation, and still . . . their continued will to survive, despite the horrors endured, we can only wonder at how immense the human spirit must be. Conversely, it is hard to conceive of what exists in the minds of torturers, what levels of consciousness they dwell in, when one tries to believe they are human beings who walk among us on this earth.

There is a vast expanse of human experience, a wide spectrum of evidence that suggests to me . . . humanity is as mysterious as its Creator. We continue to uncover such darkness and suffering, unbelievable inhuman cruelties that leave us to wonder how and when mankind will ever evolve past these deadly sins. It is only the witness of those beings who, in their simple acts of loving kindness and compassion, raise humanity above its own gravity and allow us glimpses of what we can become.