A HAUNTING AND A CURSE

by Patricia Smith Ranzoni

               

     Came a land with no children but many flowers. 

Weeded out by ground thieves, God-given, they thought 

and said. Their right, being most moral to themselves.

     In mothers’ wombs slaughtered sons and daughters. 

In incubators denied power. Refused milk, starved, no matter 

their wails, no rescue or slightest mercy even water.

     Survived to toddle, shot in their heads. Walk or run, 

in knees hobbling for life. Life? Called lawn to be mowed.

At mid-youth, still alive, picked off, 

     thought of as rats on forbidden dumps. And grass 

to be cut. Bombed and drone-shot day and night til nothing

but chunks rolled in dirt like fish in flour 

     from nets also forbidden. Came a land with no 

children, a foot, arm, patch of flesh while rubble baked and 

blew away in the sun, then the absolute misery of winter 

without shelter not a dry or safe space to be had not a meal 

     and the people who wanted it that way, staked and 

claimed, liking it with no children or only childrens’ bones, 

congratulating themselves. No humanitarian aid allowed! 

No humanity for Christ’s sake!

     Came a time their stolen olive trees turned blood red 

fruiting with the colors of newborn eyes watching them.

     Their soiled window boxes boasted the lushest 

greens ever seen, breaking out with poison petals 

startlingly splendid but quick to rot. 

     Their gardens made them sick. Trees never 

stopped boiling over with tears. Yet still, they praised

themselves, thanking their gods. 

     The map to the land with no children can be found 

by the cries the wind is made of. World ‘round, it is named 

shame in laments whispered and screamed forever.

Outback Maine native Patricia Smith Ranzoni is a child veteran of WWII and retired educator nearing the land of 85. Daughter of a woodsworking paper mill rigger and farm woman, she and her second generation Italian-American husband met and married while working their way through the University of Maine (1962). With their three children they have devoted their lives to keeping the family G.I. Bill homestead for three more generations. They were the last on both sides to keep a family cow. Her mostly self-taught poetry has been published across the country and abroad, including numerous times in The New Verse News where she goes for solace.

LISTENING TO THE NEWS AT MY FARM TABLE IN MAINE, OR SOWETO SAYING SO

by Patricia Smith Ranzoni

This morning’s bread is a recipe and a half to make full use
of yesterday’s ricotta whey. I mix and think, the drop leaf
of my old oak work table crying in rhythm with my kneading,
Mandela’s death on the radio turning into a living ingredient.

It comes to me, making this week’s oatmeal-molasses
this enriched way, that I need to look up Soweto Bread
and invent an outback Maine version, in honor, the way
our Obama Bread rose from the joy we elders earned.

Wondering at my work, I knead. And drizzle Nebali tree olive oil 
all the way from the Canaan Fair Trade route from Palestinian
farmers to brother Schaibles’ caravan downeast, its bittersweet
anointing a clear film consecrating the overcoming of apartheid
in South Africa and how, once we knew, we wrote, petitioned,
and marched, the way, after television made it this far north,
showing us, we did over our own country’s shame.

Wondering at my work, I gaze into this dough lifting
by this fire here in this north, for hope, asking, if, as we
keep hearing, people who plant trees in whose shade they know 
they will not live to sit have begun to know the meaning of life,
what can be said of those who uproot, ax, chainsaw, burn,
rip out by thousands ancient trees of others, the ancestral
food and means trees of others? The very identifying
and sacramental trees of others? The olive trees of neighbors?

Do separation barriers make them not neighbors anymore
or neighbors held apart in a less than human way? Wondering
at my work.
              
     Do not the Mandelas of the world foretell
     that the writing on the walls of the oppressed
     proves other Freedom Days are rising?
     That making bread with Palestinian oil in Maine,
     we must make up our own minds and, like Soweto,
                                        say so?


Health troubles keep Patricia Smith Ranzoni from public participation so she relies on joining her voice this way. Her unschooled work documenting the Canadian-American, mixed-blood Yankee cultures of her people has been published across the country and abroad, including past issues of The New Verse News and most recently in Parallel Uni-Verse, Tuesday Anthology of the Oregon Coast, and Bedding Vows, Love Poems from Outback Maine (North Country Press), her 9th collection. She participates electronically with the Blue Hill Peninsula Peace & Justice group.