Three Poems by Jeff Santosuosso

 

From Children

 

Mother, teach me dignity,

Mother, reproach.

 

Mother, what happens when I open the door?

Who’ll be there; whose mother’s son?

 

Mother, teach the other mothers.

Mother, I’m afraid, confused.

 

They rammed our car,

blocked our bus,

 

gassed our feet.
They said it was self-control.

 

Mother, why am I young?

Why do I feel so old?

 

Why do targets blind their eyes,

fix their focus on the fair,

 

clamp our ankles in ridicule.

Mother, I want to chew something off.

 

 

Ball Ghazal

 

The circle was perfected to the wheel, then the ball,

which urged man, imperfect, to play with the ball.

 

LeBron returned to Cleveland, but never risked his life

like the Mayans’ death game of hoop and ball.

 

France fell in love with a net, a racquet, grass, clay, or hard court,

alternating glances back and forth following the felt ball.

 

Brooding Scots trekked the moors, invented

a way to ruin a good walk chasing a dimpled ball.

 

From Elysian Fields to now, Baseball is a simple game.

You throw the ball. You hit the ball. You catch the ball.

 

Tables with sticks and chalk join angles and geometry

– plus a little hustle – with numbered colored balls.

 

Pigskin’s a relic, but not wartime blitzes and bombs,

double-ended spiraling gridiron Super ball.

 

Goooooooooooooooooooooooal!

Slow subtleties and elations of kicking a global ball.

 

Take a swim in youth, splash your friends, show off by

leaping and grasping bent knees in a cannonball.

 

 

On the Move

 

We have the rocks, too.

Nobody notices them

unless they assemble into a Fuji,

a Rainier, a Denali.

 

Cold, motionless,

the rock is dead; the rock lives.

The rock is our home.

 

Skip it and count the caroms,

before it takes its rest

on the bottom,

upon which everything else rests,

except when it rises up,

K2, Kilimanjaro, Everest,

upon which everything rests.

Jeff Santosuosso is a business consultant and award-winning poet living in Pensacola, Florida, USA.  His chap book, “Body of Water,” is available through Clare Songbirds Publishing House. He is Editor-in-Chief of panoplyzine.com, an online journal of poetry and short prose. Jeff’s work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in The Comstock Review, San Pedro River Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, The Blue Nib, Mojave River Review, The Lake (UK), Red Fez, Texas Poetry Calendar, Avocet, Pif, and other online and print publications.