Anne Benvenuti's poetry

My poetry has been published in several issues of the annual and lusciously beautiful We'Moon calendars, including the 30th Anniversary anthology.

Tender spots

The tongue of my heart
probes the space where you were,
like an empty tooth socket.
And the fingers of my heart
press on that spot over and over,
unconsciously seeking to feel
the bruised tenderness there,
where a thousand times a day
I said to you, “Sweetheart,
sweetheart. . .” Where
there is pain, there is life.
And your death will take
some getting used to.

© Anne Benvenuti 2004
Published in We’Moon Calendar, Mother Tongue Ink: 2006

This morning the rocks

this morning
the rocks spoke of the long slow
knowing that happens over time

first there is some little thing, a crack
the size of a hair,
maybe as fine as frog hair even
and then some water finds that crack
fitting itself just so, it settles and freezes

later, after the ice has returned to water
and left the crack, some lichen moves in
bringing living air space into the place that
so recently seemed rock solid and boulder

one day a great chunk falls out
and it feels lighter now
whole mountains come down this way,
slowly over time

© Anne Benvenuti 2005
Published in We’Moon Calendar, Mother Tongue Ink: 2011

Seison

When I was a little girl, just fifty years ago,
wild geese filled the autumn skies with
harsh cacophonous song: thousands shouting south!
They were calling me out to feel the wild of their ways.
Hundreds of shifting and reshaping V’s quivering,
as the compass needle inside them spoke south, south.
Gathering and going as just they ought, they turned
the earth with their near-winter work, with the tuck
and the stretch and the beat of their wings.