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Halcyon Days

/ Salvatore Ala / Leave a comment

Halcyon mornings can save a marriage,
The glittering lake is level to the bright land,
Blue is suffused with the stillness of sand
As we breathe air from another realm
And our senses waken unaware.

Even in distraction and despair
We are spellbound by the silence,
Inundated by a placid flood of heat and light,
Permeated by quiescence,
The children playing, as in a lakeside painting,
Pacified by a powerful calm.

All is quiet in us, our vows unvoiced,
Arguments overwhelmed and soundless as the shore,
Lulled by tranquilized hours
Far from chaos and confrontation,
Healed in respite of all turbulence and storms.

A Summing Up

/ Salvatore Ala / 1 Comment

My childhood was a sea voyage,
A barbershop and the ringing of a mandolin,
Summer stars through grape leaves,
Prickly pears and fig trees,
Snails creeping out of straw baskets,
Silence and violence.

My childhood was like a stuffed baby alligator
That swims in the swamp of memory,
Twice haunted twin sisters
Who survived a plane crash,
Playing cards scattered on a table,
Voices shoveling graves.

My childhood was a broken accordion,
A wine-press pressing the sun,
Chinese faces at the market,
Hunting rifles behind glass,
Dried eel at the fish store,
Rain of motherless time.

War

/ Salvatore Ala / Leave a comment

Salvatore Ala's avatarSalvatore Ala

They could not decide what to take first,
So they took everything.
They took everything and promised to return,
So the others took the nothing
They had left and hid it away.
They had no trouble hiding it.
Weeks later they returned
Demanding the nothing they left behind.
The others refused, they refused,
Claiming nothing was all they had.
So they went away to plan.
They sent their scouts
To search for the nothing.
They searched all morning.
They peered into forests.
They overturned rocks.
They parted the water
But always found something.
Determined to find nothing
They said to surrender nothing
Or be slaughtered,
But the others refused
And prepared for battle.
So the battle lasted years.
They forgot about nothing
And kept killing over nothing.
Bodies burned into nothing.
Nothing was left behind.
Legend has it, nothing was never found.
To this day there is still nothing.

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The Counterweight

/ Salvatore Ala / 2 Comments

Salvatore Ala's avatarSalvatore Ala

If you weigh the stars in the balance
Glaciers are nurseries of the stars.
They are weighbridges to the borealis,
Ice roads into isolated communities.
They’re hydroelectric power plants,
Evolutionary clocks, mammoth museums,
Icebox mountains of organic matter.
Meltwaters surge from the summits
Enlivening salmon in summer streams,
Nourishing the valley with snowmelt.
Glaciers are a kind of counterweight
To their own absence tipping the scale.
Once gone, what could replace glaciers
That we’d not burn in water/drown in fire.

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Maria Juana

/ Salvatore Ala / Leave a comment

Maria Juana,
With you I strum a green guitar.
Maria Juana,
With you I know the sound of laughter.
Maria Juana,
With you I celebrate friendship.
Maria Juana,
With you I know the body is smoke.
Maria Juana,
With you I breathe another air.
Maria Juana,
With you I dance to naked music.
Maria Juana,
With you I live a waking dream.
Maria Juana,
With you there is no lying.
Maria Juana,
With you I raise children of peace.
Maria Juana,
With you I count the sands and stars.
Maria Juana,
With you I am everywhere at once.
Maria Juana,
With you I love beyond the grave.
Maria Juana,
With you I grasp all things.
Maria Juana,
With you I am born again.
Maria Juana,
With you I weave this ancient song.
Maria Juana,
With you I am entwined.

Crow Feather Totem III

/ Salvatore Ala / Leave a comment

My daughter sees a hawk feather on the road.
Just as I pick it up the wind picks up the face of the leaves.
Just as I raise it to the air the trees begin sharing ancestral words.
Just as I pass it to my daughter she’s falling from the upper world.
Just as she takes it from my hand I am falling.
Just as she offers it back to her father she is falling.
Such things are found on the road joining young and old.
Such things happen on the spirit road.

Shadow Line

/ Salvatore Ala / Leave a comment

At the shadow line the storm’s grip is loosed,
Between a sea of light and a sea of darkness
It is beautiful and hallowed on both sides.
Rain falls from the sun and clouds glow.
Winds blow in place and yet we are moving
As though at the equinox of eternity.
At the shadow line is the peace of mountains.
At the shadow line it is the birthday of forever,
It is the anniversary of fire and night,
Sparks fly from the anvil
But the hammer sounds in the distance.

Notre-Dame-des-Neiges Cemetery

/ Salvatore Ala / Leave a comment

Montreal

Though I walk amid myriad gravestones,
The summer air is soft, trees cast full shadows,
And the grass ripples from grave to grave.
When a cloud passes, the shadows deepen.
I see Emile Nelligan, sixteen years old,
Brooding because he has fallen in love
With poetry and beauty. A breeze blows through him.
I think of Albert Lozeau, the invalid poet,
At the cold window of his solitary room;
And of the restless young Sylvain Garneau,
Gazing at the sky from his own grave;
And of how lucky I am to be thirty-two,
Hearing voices in the summer wind.
Ah, la belle vie, la belle vie… the dead are saying.

Homage to Pablo Neruda

/ Salvatore Ala / Leave a comment

Proprietor of a traveling bazaar
Of potent elixirs strained from jungles,
Vials in which rivers rage, flasks of cloud,
The granite voices of Macchu Picchu;
And impure things: wheel ruts, blood and semen,
The severed heads of dictators,
Letters from kings, propaganda;
An earthflow of love poems; and elemental things:
Lemons, artichokes, melons and salt;
Also magic potions, locks of hair,
Moonlight fossilized in stone, emeralds
From the mines of Columbia; snake skins,
Ports of call, arrivals, departures…
Lastly, Chile, like a child’s model,
Raised by the whale spine of the Andes,
With its copper-colored people,
Their stone flute music of mountain mist,
Their poverty and dignity…
Your human cry of the human market.