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Thursday
I’ve become a fan of Joseph Fasano, who posts many of his poems on Bluesky. As the GOP tries to ram its billionaire bill through Congress while cutting everything that is of worth, it’s nice to have two poems calling out these vultures.
Both poems approach the subject from a child’s point of view. Many of us can remember being Fasano’s “child with a light” who reads beneath the covers. I think of the line early in John’s Gospel (1:5): “And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.” We’re seeing a lot of uncomprehending darkness in MAGA these days.
For Those Who Try to Cut Funding for the Arts
By Joseph Fasano
I know
you won’t be reading this anyway.
But maybe,
alone under the covers,
a child with a light
in the darkness
is opening
the first words of a story,
a story that your hands
would try to close now.
Whatever you do
for the darkness
that child with the light will survive you.
The theme of darkness continues in the second poem, and I like how Fasano associates the GOP looters (thanks Ayn Rand for that label) with the dark arts. The poem feels vaguely familiar as I’ve been reading A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book, which opens with an impoverished child so enamored of art that he hides out in the British Museum, undergoing hunger and cold in order to sketch the treasures he finds there.
For Those Who Defund the Arts as a Political Weapon
By Joseph Fasano
You can waste your life on the dark arts.
But the soul in you knows what matters.
Like the boy who broke into the Louvre
and was found alone in the morning, asleep
beside the Mona Lisa.
He said she looked like his mother.
They led him back
to the orphanage–
to his century, to his little cot, his life.
Listen. A heart is what you do with it.
The world will give us sieges
and great plagues
and prophets of doom and ruin,
but who will be there for that child
who hacks for days at the window-lock
and only wants comfort
and immensity
and the smile that cannot die
What shall we do with the hearts we have been given? Those who lock them down imprison the child within, who longs for comfort and immensity and “the smile that cannot die?”
Note: Fasano’s most recent collection of poetry is The Last Song of the World (BOA Editions, 2024).
