Sample Poems by Phyllis Meshulam

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Adopted, Relinquished Country

I was a child
taken to the Old World,
to a country my father
met in war. Loved and left.
Occupied again.

Country aflutter with gestures,
fluted with vowels.
One of medieval pageants,
bronze horses, colored glass.
Rooftop theater,
cheesecloth robes,
Pinocchio masks.
Our Italian primer:
Oggi. Today.

Place a child might thrive.

We returned to our native land and
I left the bosom of the family
for the straight edge of first grade.

Desks in rows and Dick & Jane.
Foreigner, a classmate hissed.

Dad tried to keep
old words afloat. Piccolina,
poverina...

We don't need that here, I replied.

Oggi, the lost language soothes
and rankles. I find tomorrow,
domani, in cognates. But
what of yesterday?
Ah, ieri, all ephemera,
ieri.

---

Before

They were the best years of my life,
my aging sister told me.
When Dad was away in the war.
Mom, Aunt Lib, Aunt Jane, Grandma and Grandpa,
cousins. All under one roof.

Clapboard homestead:
porch pillars of stacked fieldstone,
rough-roped swing, kitchen garden.
Solar system of the town,
the house as its center, or was that
the hardware store, smelling of cigar.
Surrounded by endless fields of creaking corn.

Mom had one "daddy cheek," I had one, too.
That's where we saved kisses for him.

Dad's photo next to Uncle Bill's
on the mantel.

When they returned on the same train,
Mom told me the one with glasses
was my Daddy.
The one with the dimple,
the one who blew smoke rings,
was Uncle Bill.

Dad came back and took us away.

Far beyond the fields of corn.
To a prefab in a suburb
where I was later born.

---

Word Torches

A year in the land of my father's war.
I was five and peace was nine.
A stranger to his own once fears,
Dad became my armchair, my Babo.
Told Lambs' Tales from Shakespeare
of Romeo and Giulietta, who also lived in Italy.
From the book, a fairy coach flew out.
Dad's Romeo exclaimed for Juliet,
"Oh, she doth teach the torches to burn bright."
She, in true falsetto, cried, "a rose
by any other name would smell as sweet."
A puppet show of swordplay. Slain lovers
turned to marble statues like the crypt's.
Babo read Pinocchio. Pronounced
Italian names with gusto. Hammered
at Gepetto's bench. Vanished
behind walls and wrote his book.

In a playground of antiquities,
I balanced trippingly on stone walls.
Through close streets, new language
bubbled with laughter and starchy vapors.
I knelt in cathedrals and at Roman shrines, enthralled.
What could flash Saxon, then Latin, could turn
the gleam of marble into flesh? Spur fairy coaches,
teach torches, speak reach, speak ache.

---

City of My Father's War

Over the Arno arches
the Ponte Vecchio,
its medieval storefronts, silversmiths
and leather workers. Awnings flapping,
red roofs crusty. Cobble bells
once rung by steeds.

They said its charm had softened even
fleeing Nazi hearts. Alone among
the city's bridges
it was spared.

By peace's nine-year
watermark, stones fished
from the river, joined and mortared, bridged the rest
of the broken city into one again.

Long enough after father's war.
My own wars yet to come.