On the terrorist attack on October 31, 2017
Most cowardly violence
No moment of silence
Let’s pretend that all is well
All that once mattered
Now fallen and shattered
Here in the Great Living Hell
The bicycle path
The parade of wrath
Chilling the story they tell
Joe Tessitore is a retired New York City resident and poet.
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Brian -- yes, I think "or pulse as starlight flares" would be absolutely right. It gets rid of "quasar" and…
Mary Jane, this is a wonderful translation of Rilke's original German. I love how you maintained the rhyme-scheme and the…
Wow! Very impressive, and imaginatively creative, translation feat!
Good advice Nathan - totally agree.
Thanks Margaret. Speaking of Langston Hughes, it’s an endless fascination to me that my (and many other people’s) two favorite…
This is very telling, Mr Tessitore, and, of course, well done.
A moment of numbness, perhaps. The silence a side-effect from being at a loss for words. Thank you for finding at least a few words to touch our common sorrow.
Mr. Tessitore’s poem is immediate and heartfelt. Several items interest in the structure of the poem: 1) the rhyme scheme, aabccbddb; 2) the nominative quality, suggesting stasis; 3) the terse quality of the verse; and 4) and the tone, interwoven with pretense and the emphatic, capitalized Great Living Hell. Here is another, more prosaic, recently published rendition of the same event.
An Act of Terror, October 31, 2017
by Brice Wade Luse
“The bicycle path/ The parade of wrath…”
—Joe Tessitore
Another Muslim shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ again;
but there’s no God or Greatness when one hates one’s fellow men.
The grim Uzbeki immigrant, within a rental truck,
plowed through a bike path, killing eight, and then a school bus struck.
He was a fam’ly man who had some children of his own;
a Paterson, New Jersey mosque, his new religious home.
This follower of the Quran, a coward and a fiend,
has killed five Argentinians, who had been childhood friends,
a Belgian mother of two sons, a software engineer,
and from the World Trade Center, a program manager.
Eleven more were injured, counting children on the bus;
no happy ever after for those ripped untimely thus.
Brice Wade Luse is a poet of New York City.
I also liked the picture:
On a Picture of the Wife of Joe Tessitore
by Bruce Dale Wise
She sits upon the gray-stone,
and looks upon her cell phone,
pink flowers cased in green leaves.
Across the lined, gray, bike lane,
the red and purple in play
accent the beautiful scene,
so distant from this year’s curse,
October Thirty-First’s fears
before All Hallows’ Evening.