- Published in Amethyst Journal, 2021

Winter is piling snow on the porch railings, and ice embraces  the camellia leaves, the expectant buds.  If I forget thee…  

I fling open the front door, half expecting the fox to appear,  trotting down the road in the dark, always going somewhere.  

Where do the birds go when evening comes –  the cardinals, finches, and the others I cannot identify?    

In today’s reading, John’s disciples start to follow Jesus, who stops to ask –  what are you looking for? They say – Rabbi, where are you staying?   

Come and see, he responds.  They stay with him the rest of the day. This was before all the parables and the fish, bread, and wine.   

I walked straight eastward this morning. Between the faint striations  of clouds limning the horizon, the sun was a transmutation of fire.

Then a flurry of swifts arose – little quarter notes, high in the sky – only to disappear, flying into the vanishing point.   

The horses have been led out of the stables to graze  in the dazzling frost-covered grass, the suspension of air.    

Maybe the whole world is floating, like the ducks where the pond has not yet frozen over.  Have mercy on me. 

- Published in  Aquafier, The Florida  Review

Mother wore a nightgown and peignoir, the white filmy kind,

walked barefoot out the front door and into our back yard

to sit in her crescent-moon-shaped rose garden,

her tangled hair caught in the rattan chair.

 Those were the days when she got out of bed before noon.

O Etoile de Hollande, her favorite deep red rose—so fragrant.

Did she imagine it could be heaven, as she sat motionless

with her breakfast tray, melba toast, the loose tea leaves

floating in the china pot?

 When I was in third grade my father paid me to make his breakfast

before he went to work early in the morning.

Bacon, toast, fried eggs, coffee—I served him

at the somber mahogany table

where he ate alone, wearing his Air Force uniform.

Much later, when my parents moved again,

there was no rose garden.

On good days, she climbed a stunted apple tree

and set her tray on the low gnarled branch in front of her.

My father pointed to the tree when I came home from college once.

 When she came into an inheritance

she spent the cash on trips to Ireland and some Greek islands,

going by herself, never told me, and invested the rest

with hopes of getting rich but the broker swindled her.

 Gone, except for this picture she kept of wildflowers in Delos—

 She used to sing—I am weary unto death—

- Published in Split The Rock Poetry Database

Lunch today for the inmates means white bread

and a slice of baloney. Dinner is more of the same.

The limit now - two meals a day to stay in budget.

The jail's run by a profit-making corporation.

Vending machines hold other selections,

like undated Twinkies and cinnamon buns.

Immigration rents beds here

for young, married Chinese women

without papers, only fake passports they bought in haste.

Fearing reprisals, they fled the provinces, their homes and families.

For one bore a child after marrying too young, at twenty,

and another had a second child, a girl.

One has an abscessed tooth.

As a volunteer, I write down her plight,

mainly that she cannot pay a Chinese-speaking lawyer

in New York City, her only hope, or even call long distance,

collect. I read her confession, search for gestures.

The budget does not fund dental work, I'm told.

What's more, they charge for aspirin.

The next one, wearing the same ink-blue pajamas

and plastic shower shoes,

holds her stomach, speaks of constant pain.

The doctor comes once a month

and sees only those who signed up long before.

The system weeds out malingerers, the female warden says,

handing me a sheaf of small-print regulations.

 -Published on Mike Maggio Blog, 2021

Do not wander from your path any longer, for you are not likely to read your notebooks or your deeds of ancient Rome and Greece or your extracts from their writings, which you had laid up against old age. - Marcus Aurelius                                                                                                                     

 A poem is a spiritual suitcase, 

 so take everything out.

 In a dead camel I found a mass 

 of plastic bags as big as a large suitcase, 

 touted to cure the sickness. 

 I took the whole thing out. 

 The life you dreamed about is here 

 but the tone seems off.  

 Invite the stranger to a feast, 

 which is where you need to go.

 Cross out the scholarly quotes 

 and the part about airmen 

 roving through tomato fields 

 in Spain, hunting for unexploded 

 hydrogen bombs.  Aurelius died 

 near the Danube, far from Rome, 

 and here you are, perplexed by how 

 to part with possessions and notebooks.

 Jesus beckons to a tax collector

 and Matthew looks surprised, 

 points to himself and asks, 

 “Who, me?”  It actually happened, 

 but who would believe it? I thought 

 I’d seen everything. Then he rises to go 

 to the banquet.  When we are empty, 

 we fill our lives.  

* Authors Note: “A Poem is a Spiritual Suitcase” responds to a prompt to combine lines from two of my poems with the option of adding lines from a news article.  I took the title from something Spencer Reese said in a Paris Review interview.

10 poems by Bonnie Naradzay have been published in the Ekphrastic Review.  

Click Here to view  the poems

- Both Poems Published in The Seminary Ridge Review

PANIS AGELICUS

I saw the finger dripping soot, and felt

the touch, but could not see what others saw

in me. Behind the altar at Holy Rosary,

pastel angels, glowing in halations,

looked at me: a sinner kneeling in their pews.

It’s Lent, the place where we left off. Stations

of the Cross, and grief for what’s been lost

and so I pondered what to do to make it

meaningful. Perhaps re-join a choir. Or

seek to make amends to you, my son.

At Madonna House on Capitol Hill,

I learned to decorate pysanky eggs

(just empty shells, already hollowed out)

then prayed incessantly that I might hear

from you. Melted beeswax over flames.

Confession? Where to start? I meant to go.

Bewildered by the unfamiliar liturgy

I sang the mass parts in our choir loft.

Hearing about the Prodigal Son, I thought

of Rembrandt’s work, the feast inside the door.

Lent could be perpetual for me,

a chronic state, like being underwater,

suspended, trying not to breathe until

feeling buoyed up when Triduum

arrives, and when I hear from you.

Once more I trudge (no, run – it’s late) uphill

to the lay apostolate, passing sentries

on the way, desperate to taste a crumb

of symbolism (hot cross buns) after

chanting psalms in halting antiphons.

At last the dreadful re-enactment came,

rehearsed with incense, acccusations:

it descended during fierce winds and snow.

A woman I know says she has a son

even though he fell to his death (with a branch

in his hand) years ago in Rome. About you,

I lie, say “Portland” when friends ask where

you are, and, “He’s doing well.” Oh, I wasted

Lent, the whole time, spent it like a prodigal,

my loss too great to be absorbed, distracted by

the off-key choir’s strangely jarring tunes,

translations that confused me. The empty tomb.

SEAGLASS

Think of blue green algae in the leaf-dark pool,

or milk-white pebbles gathered by a thirsty crow.

Green like muscat grapes – or eucalyptus trees.

Sulphurous skies. Last night’s chives. A plume

of phosphorus, and molten threads of a filtered

golden afternoon. Baltic amber washed ashore.

Think of yellowed insects trapped in pinesap,

rosin for the bow, and sundials of bronze. Blue

curve of Murano quartz. Pearls, eyes: cracked,

scattered, cauterized – or Cape May diamonds

from sunset tides. Honeyed throat drops, or souls

freed of earthly bodies, waiting in a field of stars.

- Published in  AGNI

For Stanley Plumly

           Like every other griever, I choose a flower, a violet – from “Brownfields”

He said to put myself in the poem,

though I had written about the potato famine.

Have you been to Ireland? he asked.

Yes, to Dingle, I said – on the peninsula

where sheep graze, and the Blaskets,

where seals bob in the shadows

of the tide that will take us away.

He asked if I could film that scene.

Stay in the moment, he said.  Be a guide,

for you can’t disappear in the poem

or let your mind get lost in memories.

Poetry is meditation and a looking back,

he said. And don’t be in a hurry to send out 

poems. Let it take years. It’s awful when

you can’t get what you want.

What matters most is how the pain

can try to weigh you down.

Then you must start all over again –

-Published in the Potomac Review Journal, 2020

Birmingham Diptych

  After Dawoud Bey’s “Birmingham Project”

involuntarily I am pulled back           to that September morning

to Sunday the blue skies that day          the moment before, 

the moment after         what would it be like                                            

to resurrect those         who never went on to have a full life       

under this silent sky,                 tall branching trees

but the past will not come back                      I had to embrace them

this is a classroom, the lunch counter          the back of his neck, the barber shop

quiet blue skies riding by            as if a child is looking out the car window                                                   

the trees the lost feeling of holiness                          and underneath, the seething                           the split screen

the lampposts, the tops of buildings                    then the classroom appears, 

with crayon drawings          about not giving up

eyes focused                         they are looking through shattered glass not blurred but clear as the journey ends           the church comes into view

Crows on Bird Walk  

Mark holds up his bird-call impersonator 

  then says he is telling the wood peewee we are friends

    but to me it might as well be Church Slavonic

a crow after flying away leaves its caw behind  

  the tails of barn swallows fork but the crow’s tail does not

    we may have seen two eastern meadowlarks

one bird with a distinctive cry is saying lookatme lookatme

  John Wilkes Booth’s last words were useless useless

    wrens sound as if they’re scolding us

the Carolina Wren says teakettle teakettle

  why do birds risk their lives to sing

    a starling pecks at horse manure a flycatcher works the till

I tell Bob about the bird trapped in the Nashville airport

  he puts a sprig of invasive stilt grass in his bird notebook 

    between its lines like crows’ feet 

purple martins soar above the baseball field

  someone points to a crow walking along the road

    that bows its head at every step as if to genuflect 

after Cavafy     - Published in the Northern Virginia Review

Do not hurry your journey to 

the Isola de San Michel.  Better 

that it last for years, so you come

laden with thoughts of all you’ve lost 

along the way while you embark 

on the crowded vaparetto 

from Venice, the city now swathed 

in scaffolding, sinking 

into its canals.  As you eat fried 

calamari, wrapped in paper,

bought at the dock, the boat will chug 

past Torcello, with its poppy 

fields, malarial swamps, lagoons, 

the wall covered in mosaics

showing scenes from Revelations.

Rejoice that you are old when 

you first approach, from the water,

the Island of the Dead.  

It has always been on your mind. 

When you finally step ashore,  

you’ll pass by ancient heaps of bones;

then the old Franciscan church 

appears. At the door, stone angels 

will greet you.  Inside, cowled monks 

tend the candlelit reliquary.

Otherwise you could not know 

such peace still exists in this world 

of seagulls, lizards, and hooded crows. 

- Published in the Poet Lore Journal, Fall/Winter 2017, Volume 112 #3/4)

Today I have brought haikus.  We count syllables.  

 One woman says she writes poems in her head. 

Another writes letters to her mother, who died last year. 

 Veronica says she’s in for drunk driving again 

but doesn’t belong here.  Wanda says her friend 

 got four years for DWI after her car rammed 

another car and the other driver wasn't even hurt. 

 We read the Basho poem about the frog jumping

 into the pond.  “What do you see,” I ask.  The new arrival, 

 who wears socks on her arms

because the cellblock is so cold, says it reminds her 

 of a dream she had last night,

but the pond in her dream was a lake, muddy and deep, 

 with catfish.  The final haiku is by Richard Wright,

about whitecaps in the bay and the sign banging 

 in the April wind.  Wanda asks, “What are whitecaps?”

- Published in the Crab Creek Review, 2023

At last, the snow. I shoveled the walk before disappearing inside

my black hole; the snow kept on falling anyway.

The hospice worker said the dying regretted not having 

lived true to themselves before slowly fading away. 

Genesis starts over and tells two different creation stories;

we can’t even get this right without losing our way.

Earth is close to losing its second moon, and black holes

obliterate galaxies – the stars disappearing, just going away.

Prisoners at Guantanamo, never charged, wrote poems

on styrofoam cups until guards took even this writing away.

I told my friend I don’t think I have a self.  He said we all do.

So I tried to say it’s somewhere else – not inside hiding, anyway.

White of forgetting, sustenance of despair. To find my son, I’d sail 

past the pillars of Hercules if I could stop drowning this way.  

nominated for a Pushcart Prize

-Published in Pinch Journal, 2010

buttoned at the wrists to handle money,

which she believed was dirty. She carried 

her bills and coins in a small paper bag, 

dumping them out on the department store 

counter when she bought Arden facial cremes. 

“It’s rude to talk of money at the table,” 

she said, preferring us to speak of cabbages

and kings. She took off her gloves to dine

and ate artichoke hearts with a finger bowl.

Her favorite film star, Audrey Hepburn, wore 

a fitted lavender wool coat, empire-style waist, 

for Love in the Afternoon. Mother’s tailor 

copied the design. She buttoned her coat 

on wintry days and touched her throat 

with a handkerchief of scented Belgian lace,

quoting Hepburn’s line to Gary Cooper –

“I’m susceptible, you know.” 

To Alzheimer’s,

it turned out, after decades of sadness and fog.

To go to work, I tune the TV to I Love Lucy

reruns, pull down shades and lock the house, 

leaving Mother sitting on the living room couch

inside layers of nightgowns, a pale water lily. 

- Published in The Poetry Miscellany, 2022

Univeristy of  Tennessee Chatanooga

Swept in by October’s clean blue winds,

the airborne birds deploy their landing gear:

splayed feet like water skis.

They transform their shapes

with nonchalance,

create momentary wakes.

The green slick parts ways.

These are not Mary Oliver’s wild geese

but tell me about despair

and the vestibule of Purgatory

that we’re in.

And I will tell you how to let it all go

leaving nothing but a slick green residue of sin.

- Published in The Innisfree Poetry Journal

BATHING IN BENARES

The sinking sun glints off the backs

of water buffalo, sleek from plowing

monsoon paddies in the heat.  Along

the pilgrimage road at dusk, Sanyasi

wrapped in saffron chant their ancient Sanskrit

prayers, hold out begging bowls for rice.  Here

Death is unveiled in ash-strewn air, silken saris,

Flower petals, and jasmine entwining the hair

of penitents who descend the holy river's ghats

to bathe and soak, while buzzards circle Parsi

funeral towers.  When fires lick the high-caste

corpse that floats away on its pyrrhic boat,

flames illuminate the night, the drifting, fragrant smoke.

Whole generations silt these waters.  Wade in with me.

EVENING BOAT RIDE: RHINE RIVER

O silver river, let the night inspire.

While birches shudder in the ghostly breeze,

the poet reaches heaven with his lyre.

The darkened Rhine flows by cathedral spires;

the moon suffuses rooftops in a frieze.

O silver river, let the night inspire.

When splashed by waves, we hear a holy choir

and behold pale Lorelei, with gleaming knees.

the poet reaches heaven with his lyre.

Release us from this reef, this watery desire;

Strap us to the mast of entrancing memories,

O dream-enhancing river.  Let this night expire.

The river glimmers in the moonlight's fire.

Opening another Liebfraumilch, we seize   

the poet, who leans heavily on his lyre.

The night cascades towards morning's pyre;

the wine is gone, the boatman wants our fees.

You silent river, let your sounds inspire

the poet, exhausted now and sleeping on her lyre.

- Published in One Journal, Issue 21 

Winters were mild. We imported peyote,

practiced missionary acts on rattan mats.

Cockroaches waved their ludic feelers at us.

We faked our IDs.

Mr. Aycock, in Existential Lit,

taught us that free will is just like refusing

painkillers when sitting in the dentist’s chair.

It sounded easy.

Real flamingos hung out at the nearby pool,

idly standing on single legs to see us

walk the plank by falling off the diving board

because we felt free.

We scanned Sapphics and crammed marijuana seeds

in Louisiana Picayunes just to

blow smoke rings in the air near our professor,

a sad PhD.

Eels lurked in reeds that grew submerged in the lake

where we waterskied. Nearby, cypress trees were

strung with curlicues of gray-green Spanish moss.

Our own Innisfree.

- Published in Kenyon Review

sometimes my sister will e-mail me at 1am

to say she’s feeling distraught and then

at 3am a message to report she’s feeling

so much better now but I don’t know this

till I wake the next morning and piece

the sequence together what I mean to say

is she made up her mind again to run away

from her husband in her late-model car

everything was packed but she decided

to stop before setting off at Cuppa Cheer

and pick up the cookies she’d ordered there

she told the nice lady about needing to flee

then the lady who had troubles of her own

said let’s pray and wrapped a prayer shawl

around her in a big hug my sister took it

as a sign to stay after all and drove home

just in time to unload before her husband

returned from work the cookies were good

our lives can be like that—awful but cheerful

- Published in Tar River Poetry

Four women of a certain age,

we are gathered at Don Pollo's

to read aloud our latest poems,

with Pam stating that hers, in case

we missed it, is on sexual

awakening. Digging into

spit-roasted chicken, we mention

ex-husbands. Norma says she’ll like

hers more after he dies, and this

reminds me to outlive mine so

he doesn’t get his hands on my

pension. A Moroccan soccer

player on the big tv whips

off his wild shirt after he scored.

Staring, transfixed, at his rippling

chest and abdomen, I fumble

for words to explain how seeing

his bared body affects me, while

Linda, having already talked

of her new decisiveness in

the garden, now that she’s sixty,

her freedom to uproot plants if

they don’t fit in, says it’s on all

the talk shows, it’s what women want,

so now I wonder what it is

and remember that guy at Squaw

Valley who talked of tantric bliss.

When I was younger, I tell them,

while eating bread pudding from a

styrofoam plate, it was always

the high-minded renaissance man

who caught my attention. What a

disaster! Once more, I glance up

at the soccer game. Do I see

Apollo's torso—his smiling

hips, thighs—or the nameless oarsmen

who rowed Odysseus to shore?

-Published in Epoch Literary Journal & Galway Review

E detto l’ho perche doler ti debbia – Inferno, xxiv, 151

In the Summer of Love, the brown paper bag

near our kitchen sink was filled with a week’s

midden heaps. Sodden garbage rotted on the floor,

and maggots, impersonating rice, writhed free.

Pulverized garlic, which we wore in our socks,

stalked through our nightmares while we slept.

By daylight, strange fumes leapt from our tongues.

Our Siamese cat, in heat, streaked out the door.

Lowell told our King James Bible class he was off

to Brazil, but he only got as far as McLean Hospital,

in Belmont, for a cure. I was the night attendant

who dozed in the hallway, propped against the wall.

Alba, the promising dropout, lit hash on our stove

and sucked up the smoke through a rolled-up fifty.

He stole my Chaucer, Keats and Bede and sold

them to the used book emporium in Central Square.

Weekends, up in Vermont, we gathered sheaves

of marijuana from the VFW’s front yard and dried

the lot in a Laundromat. We sold it all in tie-dyed bags

at steep discounts. Leaves curled like little fists inside.

By summer’s end, there was nothing we believed in.

Yams sprouted vines that crawled away

from us, and bancha tea could not keep us awake.

And I have told you this to make you grieve.

- Published in the Xavier Review

FILLING OUR LIVES

Meditation (Filling Our Lives) 

Do not wander from your path any longer, for you are not 

likely to read your notebooks or your deeds of ancient Rome 

and Greece or your extracts from their writings, which you 

had laid up against old age.

  Marcus Aurelius  

The future comes in the guise of spring rising all around us

after the rain ends and you’ve planted bulbs into the ground.

Toss out last year’s odds and ends.  The life you dreamed about

is here. Think of veering completely off the rails or going out 

another way, like those disciples on the way to Emmaus,

because you will meet a stranger on your journey, as they must,

and invite the stranger to a feast, which is where you need to be.

Aurelius died near the Danube, far from Rome, and here you are,

perplexed by how to part with rooms full of possessions, notebooks.

Jesus beckons to a tax collector to come with him.  Matthew looks 

surprised, points to himself and asks, “Who, me?”  Then he rises, 

follows him to the banquet.  When we are empty, we fill our lives.  

_

HOLY CROSS ABBEY, EARLY NOVEMBER

The tall, elderly monk who puts out the candles, the last to leave, 

pauses and stands blinking before us as if surprised before he turns to go. 

In the far pasture where black cows graze, a lone apple tree 

still holds its leaves, which are green, not burnished or brown.  

Yellow apples, bold neon ornaments, crown the highest branches. 

Grass, washed in sunlight, covers the mown fields –

not yet the dull thatch of winter.  Is this all a trick of the eye?

Nothing has changed.  I have brought my heart to be cracked open 

yet I am riveted only by the cows moving single-file down the field 

as if they are summoned by an unheard call.

Clouds part to reveal the mountain ridge beyond the Shenandoah.  

At the altar, darkness and the torn veil.

When I broke the Chinese bowl, my son made it whole, gluing the shards. 

If I had it now, I’d fill the lines with gold.

_

SOUP KITCHEN PANTRY IN A CHURCH BASEMENT

It’s time to rise and go, before the doors are closed.  

 When I ask what they’d like to read next time,

Tony, who sleeps on the steps of St. Paul’s and quotes 

 the Psalms, wants more from Yeats.  After reading 

“The Coat” today, they asked why he would turn away

 from mythologies, if they kept him warm. 

Small passing facts:  Carl sleeps near the M Street Bridge  

 unless the weather’s really bad. He likes 

Eliot, especially that one about Prufrock.

 Tarik hides clothes near the library.  Loves Rumi.

Robert, slowly rising from the table, wants poems 

 about the arrival of spring despite 

the snow that fell last night and froze the daffodils. 

 Last week, after we read poems by Franz Wright,

Sheila wrote about walking to Martha’s Vineyard 

 when the tide was low.  She asks for love poems,

like ‘How Do I Love Thee,’ which she once knew by heart. 

 Leaning on his cane, Mo says poetry 

makes him forget about his troubles and his pain.

 We are nearing the threshold of both worlds.

Outside, we climb stairs into the light-filled morning.

- Published in The Rhino Poetry Journal, 2019

It is yesterday.  It is still yesterday – Mark Strand, “Nostalgia”

Isaiah tells us we have all withered

like leaves, and our guilt carries us away

like the wind.  Why can’t I transform myself?

It is Sunday again.  Words cannot help.

Comfort, comfort your people, says your God.

Our guilt is heavy, and our suffering

is great (Isaiah again). The pastor,

rolling up his sleeves, now walks among us,

asks how many times we have made mountains

higher, valleys steeper, wanting the way

to be harder for others.  Bear in mind,

he says, who we’ve done that to.  All my life,

I think, all my life, and to everyone. 

Why won’t my son come home again?

Comfort.  On the radio a man said

people go to church these days to enter

meditative states in a structured space,

to abide in the cloud of unknowing.

Everything’s so hard to bear all the time.                  

Nobody asks about him anymore.

nominated for a Pushcart Prize

- Published in News Letter Journal, 2018, Volume 84 #s 2&3

The part about airmen roving through tomato fields in Spain   

just before tourist season, hunting for unexploded hydrogen bombs?

I took the whole thing out.  Too real, I thought.  It actually happened, 

like the dying Chernobyl worker, how pieces of his liver, lungs, 

his insides, were all sliding from his mouth, his tongue 

falling out, his overtime paid in bottles of vodka, touted 

to cure the strange sickness.  True, but who would believe it?  

When the East Germans refused to work without safety garb, 

the tone seemed off. I left it in but crossed out the bourgeois 

vignette about the peanuts in the silver inlaid dish and, yes,

Brecht’s view of the birds from his hospital window in Berlin.

They had to go, and the scholarly quotes, the paraphrased lines, 

like “Simonides was a rotten skinflint,” for which I substituted 

the original Greek: “We are all sons of bitches now.” 

Click Here to view poems

- 5 Poems Published in The Galway Review, 2020

Click Here to view poems

- Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 24, Issue 6.

The magnolia’s petals are splendidly pink,

and the turtles here

have lined up on a log that juts over the pond

as sunlight falls through the slanting reeds.

I miss those mornings when you tossed up the tea bag

in an arc and aimed it to land in your cup

and that time you showed me how to hold–

–to hold the imaginary cue stick so you could teach me

how to win at pool. All those nights we spent 

ranking the screw-top wines we drank.

Here minnows swim with dark fluency; they send ripples 

from just below the surface, as you are doing to me now, 

and barn swallows arc through the lambent air –