Poems by John L. Stanizzi
NO MORE TROUBLE
Cuban Missile Crisis
October 12, 1962
October 28, 1962
It must be that it was intuition
fueled by overheard conversations that
the adults around me were having, their
faces shaded by worry in their eyes,
because I wouldn’t know until later
the things they were trying to hide from me —
the 43 seconds until the end,
the uranium bullet, the vapors
of people that left shadows, the pressure,
the tsunami of smoke, the wind that raged
a thousand miles per hour, the heat of
7000 degrees, the vanishing
of tens of thousands in that instant wrath —
vague debris that razed me each night with fear.
RASTAMAN, LIVE UP!
August 31, 2011,
for Jonathan
In those first perfectly still moments just
after his death, everything in the room
was the color of the wrinkled, faded
sheets, even the people and their clothing,
the furniture, the curtains, the cell phones
the people would use to bring the sad news —
everything there was a flat-gray that could
only absorb the departure of the
spirit, though not really comprehend its
going – it was in those first perfectly
still moments after your grandfather’s death
that you sat in the chair next to his bed,
held his hand and chanted softly — Live up!
praying for both of you in the gray air.
About the Poet
John L. Stanizzi is author of Ecstasy Among Ghosts, Sleepwalking, Dance Against the Wall, After the Bell, and Hallelujah Time! His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The New York Quarterly, American Life In Poetry, Chiron Review, Tar River Poetry, Rattle, Passages North, and many others. John has read at many venues throughout Connecticut, including The Sunken Garden Poetry Festival, RJ Julia Booksellers, and the Arts Café Mystic. His work has been featured on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac. He is an adjunct professor of English at Manchester Community College. He lives with his wife, Carol, in Coventry, Connecticut. http://www.johnlstanizzi.com
