Poems by Dante Di Stefano
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In the Era of Biological Annihilation
by Dante Di Stefano
Dante lives near the confluence of the Susquehanna River and the Chenango River between the Endless Mountains of Northern Pennsylvania and the Finger Lakes of Central New York.
Pen the giraffe inside the zoo of your poems.
Bury your poems in the mouth of a tree frog.
Do not listen for the amphibian apocalypse.
Disregard the hummingbird’s shimmer.
From the curved glory of the elephant tusk,
build an ivory cage for your daydreams.
Climb inside the ivory cage and shut the door.
Imagine yourself, a lion and a lioness, roaring.
Step inside your own jaws when you do
and dwell in the sound reverberating there.
The oceans are calling you and the moon
and the sun and all the vertebrae of God
are aligned and singing for you to fall
into place, to recognize the mammalian heat
that binds you to the sleek wet fur of the earth.
You inhabit one note and call that a lifespan.
You would burn away the impossible oxygen
of a single breath. You would ignite
the hydrogen molecules in your own body.
You will leave your great great grandchildren
a world without the music of humpback
and nightingale, without the tiger’s stripes,
without equal possibilities of glacier and gazelle.
The caribou knows more about conservation
than you; listen for the clash of invisible antlers
as you drive furiously down the interstate.
The entire biosphere hums you into being.
The fawn in you will curl up and go to sleep
while in a billion, billion, billion other galaxies
untold numbers of new stars will be born.
© Dante Di Stefano
My Eighteen-Month-Old Daughter Talks to the Rain as the Amazon Burns
by Dante Di Stefano
From Canary Spring 2022
this little lark says hi
to the rain—she calls
riveras she slaps
the air with both wings—
she doesn’t know pine
from ash or cedar
from linden—she greets
drizzle & downpour
alike—she doesn’t
know iceberg from melt—
can’t say sea level
rise—glacial retreat—
doesn’t know wildfire—
greenhouse gas—carbon
tax or emission—
does not legislate
a fear she can’t yet
feel—only knows cats
& birds & small dogs
& the sway of some
tall trees make her squeal
with delight—it shakes
her tiny body—
this thrill of the live
electric sudden—
the taste of wild blue-
berries on her tongue—
the ache of thorn-prick
from blackberry bush—
oh dear girl—look here—
there’s so much to save—
moments—lady bugs—
laughter—trillium—
blue jays—arias—
horizon’s pink hue—
we gather lifetimes
on one small petal—
the river’s our friend—
the world: an atom—
daughter: another
name for: hope—rain—change
begins when you hail
the sky sun & wind
the verdure inside
your heart’s four chambers
even garter snakes
and unnamed insects
in the underbrush
as you would a love
that rivers: hi—hi
© Dante Di Stefano
Reading Miguel Hernández to My Toddler as Thousands of Emperor Penguin Chicks Disappear
by Dante Di Stefano
Little lark of my house,
we totter on the brink
of an incremental extinction;
remember, a small shift
in degrees might sluice us
into the cold blue sea
of nonexistence. This
is no metaphor. We all
tread water with brined
lungs and a horizon
swallowed up by blizzards.
An arctic wind yowls
in your father’s chest
when he thinks of you
jaunting an earth fringed
with inevitable disaster.
O future of my bones
and of my love,
little linnet, you break apart
the iceberg in me.
Keep brimming, you beauty,
even on the edge of apocalypse,
fly us, buoy us, plummet us,
against all despair.
© Dante Di Stefano
The Paris Agreement
by Dante Di Stefano
It’s Saturday afternoon in the universe and I am wondering what’s on Netflix while the planet is dying and I am reimagining a world of microorganisms sustained and thriving on the mummified lips of the corpse of Kerouac — or is it Frank O’Hara? — no, it’s just some sad former postal employee who voted the Republican ticket every election and went to confession once a week for thirty years and succumbed to pancreatic cancer three years after retirement, but who had become a vegetarian for health reasons in the early twenty first century and practiced yoga and yet could never shed the north side working class from his repertoire of ways of being or almost Vietnam for that matter and who was my father in the last tweaked vision of the Anthropocene.
In America, an author in The Atlantic says, “we have figured out how to launder our money through our higher virtues,” and that is why we read The Atlantic and why we heat our homes with clean coal lit by the crumpled envelopes of junk mail offering to reduce school loans and why the sculpted bodies of Instagram celebrities spin through the undersides of our closed eyelids — even those of us unfamiliar with Instagram — and why we on the bottom still write poetry and die poor and hide behind the landlady’s accordion blinds in apartment living rooms across the nation.
Meanwhile, what about police brutality and homophobia and ableism and confederate monuments and rapists in the White House and serial abusers of women under almost every roof and white supremacists in the White House and con men in the White House and criminals in the White House? …and we should all be rioting in the streets every day and the baby is crying upstairs so I can’t be more specific, but…
Someday soon, I’m going to walk away from the fresh cut lawns of the suburbs, find myself a timbered antiphon, the vesper in a single leaf, hold it out for my wife, for my daughter, for this doomed earth cradling our golden now.
© Dante Di Stefano