Donna Pucciani, a Chicago-based writer, taught English for many years before retiring to write full time. She enjoys travelling, genealogy, reading, and learning Italian in order to speak to and correspond with her newly-discovered cousins in Bergamo. Her latest book of poetry is EDGES.
Rooms
The old floorboards creak
with life after life.
Parquet lies deep in thought,
echoing footfalls
in a house of few rooms.
Strife and merriment,
imprisoned in small spaces,
emerge in golden afternoons,
filtering the oncoming dusk,
welcoming fireflies and bats.
Bedroom nights catch
a corner of the moon
in the shaved sunlight
of winter mornings.
Windows
Something about walls
demands space
for distant vision—sky,
cloud, and the light silence
of dragonflies in sunlit noons.
My Italian grandmother
used to lean on the windowsill,
looking down on the streets
of West New York, waiting for cars,
watching mothers walk to market,
their children lagging behind,
clutching chalk for hopscotch.
She knew that out there
was a world beyond
mothballed linens, iron bedsteads,
scrubbed linoleum, plaster saints,
and pasta al dente. I lift my head
above my books to watch
the ever-shifting horizon,
to view something beyond
word and desk, far from
the syllables I’ve sought since youth,
seeking the dappled truth of fog,
the untranslatable language of rain.