We always had company on the weekends when my father was alive, especially his family, but after he died, they stopped coming and things grew quieter at home. It was also difficult financially which is why my Aunt Mary and my grandmother gave up their apartment in Brooklyn and came to live with us so that they could contribute to maintaining the house and helping my mother. Also, visits from relatives changed during that time and Saturday night was when we saw an influx of my mother’s family coming around. Sometimes it was my mother’s youngest brother Mike, his wife Vivian, and three of their four children, my cousins Theresa, Phyllis, and Michael. My older cousin Joe was married to his first wife by then and though they visited, too, it was generally on holidays. Saturday nights, though, became poker night as I mentioned in an earlier post and dominated…

It all started with my mother. Most things back then seemed to anyway and this was no exception. The way it went was something like this: she was bored just looking after me and my father didn’t want her to work, some macho Italian pride thing with him, like I’m the man of the family and I’ll make enough to take care of us. My mother, though, like so many women during the war had learned to be independent of the men in their lives who were off in the armed services doing what men do in circumstances like that and she had worked in Grumman’s, a defense plant on Long Island, riveting airplanes together and taking care of my sister, my aunts who lived with my parents, and the house she bought on Long Island without consulting my father who did not, I repeat, did not want to leave…

-Perişan Sofra-

Öldü; ne rüzgârlar girdi içeri,
Ne bir kuş havalandı pencereden.
Öldü; kimse görmedi melekleri;
Sorma nasıl habersiz gitti giden.

Bir uzun sefere çıktı, diyorlar;
Gemiyi gören var mı? hani deniz?
Sen gittin, soframız oldu târumar;
Doğan günü yadırgıyor hâlimiz.

-Cahit Sıtkı Tarancı…

Translation: 

-A Miserable Dining Table-
She died; neither the winds entered inside,
Nor did the birds fly away from the window.
She died; no one saw the angels;
Don’t ask how silently she was gone.
They say she set forth on a long journey;
Has anyone seen the ship? Where is the sea?
You are gone, leaving our dining table miserable;
Our mind can’t accept the newly-born day.

Translated by R. U.

Last full moon of winter will find us later this week. Anyone up for another communal poetry writing and sharing party on this upcoming full moon?  If you are, just use the tag “fullmoonsocial” on your WordPress blog post or #fullmoonsocial if you’re tweeting your poem.

I’ve got the moon hitting full at 1:05 pm EST. At that point, until it sets wherever you happen to be, consider the party to be started. I’ll be following the tags and posting links to your poems as I see them. As with our inaugural full moon social, if you’re interested in having your poem (or photo or artwork, whatever you post!) included in a free epub anthology that I’ll put together shortly after the party, let me know in an email to jeffrey.schwaner@gmail.com. If you’re contributing, all rights are retained by you. The moon doesn’t take your rights.

January 15th-18th I’ll be one of a group of several dozen poets reading at Bridgewater College, just up the road from me in Bridgewater, Virginia, as part of the Bridgewater International Poetry Festival.

The festival pairs poets, who each read for 20 minutes, and then answer questions from the festival attendees for another 20 minutes. The poetry festival is the brainchild of fellow Virginia poet Stan Galloway, a professor of English at the college. My slot comes on the first day of the festival at 1:30 pm. The most up-to-date version of the schedule can be found at the link above.

The writing of poetry is a solitary type of thing, as we all know, and I’m looking forward to meeting with so many poets from different backgrounds and different parts of the world.

My plan is to split my 20 minutes between a selection of poems from the…