Donna Pucciani

Tipton Poetry Journal – Summer 2021

Hope hides

Donna Pucciani

in the thickness of a gray dawn, for what is there to look forward to? But don’t be foolish: The day stretches before us into a flickering sunshine, sweeping the snow-clad roofs of suburbia, making the dark streets shine with false promises. The hope of night, even moonless, is far more practical. There’s no hypocrisy: dark is dark, predictable, universal in its grasp, terrible in its truth. Old folk, knitting and muttering, know this: Hope is for the young, who embrace life as it scrolls its scripture into the future. Work, love, the patterns of uncountable days, are never gathered in the soul until everything is finished, when time turns back on itself. Death sings its own psalm when, tired of searching the dim or too-bright planetary spheres for something resembling peace, we settle for the immediacy of rain on a windowpane, the smell of bread baking, a dog barking in the distance, a train whistling into nowhere.

Donna Pucciani, a Chicago-based writer, has published poetry worldwide in such diverse publications as Shi Chao Poetry Meniscus, Gradiva, Acumen, Voice and Verse and other journals. Her most recent book of poems is Edges.