To Warm My Bones
A cup of tea for me to warm my bones
And I shall listen to your grief until
The night turns to day and the dove intones
Its plaintive song and dew forms on the sill.
And I shall listen to your grief until
You have no grieving left and you have sung
Your plaintive song and dew forms on the sill
And sleep comes down to still your fretting tongue.
You have no grieving left and you have sung
Till all the demons of your heart have fled,
And sleep comes down to still your fretting tongue.
Now I stand watch, your torments in my head.
Till all the demons of your heart have fled:
This pledge I made to you, and I have kept.
Now I stand watch, your torments in my head,
And weep the same hot tears that you have wept.
This pledge I made to you, and I have kept,
Ends here. Hush now, no one must hear my moans
And weep the same hot tears that you have wept.
A cup of tea for me to warm my bones.
Skeletons
Now for these new flowers the final touch, a thick
blanket of this mulch. Its rich tang removes me
to his idle barn where, upstairs, the floorboards—
widely spaced—made me hold my breath.
And his house, the front door open and the back,
his sweet smoke wafting through, carried by the breeze.
“These now are my only tools.” He meant his pipe,
stick matches and tobacco jar.
On a cardboard box in the attic a hen,
a tin metal toy. You pushed it down on its
red, spring loaded legs, and out from a hole dropped
the plastic egg, darkened by time.
In the box the smell of former life, the bones:
An ulna and a clavicle, greasy still,
a tibia and one huge femur, its old ball
round, smooth, ready to work again.
They were his daughter’s bones. Someone had let her
keep them for her studies of the healing arts.
Next to them her yellowed Gray’s Anatomy,
her notes in faded fountain pen.
His name was Alessandro, but here they called
him Alex, a name that sounded like a bag
of rattling sticks. Alessandro bends and breathes,
somewhere between the soil and sun.
Carmine Di Biase writes about English and Italian literature, and his poems have appeared in various journals. He has recently retired as Distinguished Professor of English at Jacksonville State University in Alabama. His chapbook of poems, American Rondeau, is due out from Finishing Line Press in August of 2022.