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Live Encounters Poetry & Writing July 2023
Broken season, poems by Caterina Mastroianni.
Broken season
Purposeless words float by me
like a carbonised fallacy left behind
while temperature and metabolic
variance visit me daily, even hourly.
How this broken season exposes you,
frees me from illusions at a cost!
In a sweat, I climb to the crown of the tree,
merging in with all the women who evince
how love is meant to begin and bend,
its’ steadiness gliding and branching
to reach a rutilant, old leaf bowing
showing me how to drift, spiral and fall.
My emerging crown
framing my face
half-silver fragments
fall
fleet
onto my shoulders
the weight pressures me
into and out of greyness,
insignificance,
significance,
function,
capability,
into becoming
fully crowned
but not yet,
this expectation,
not yet,
this new beginning.
I reach for the hair dye.
Duplicity
What do I tastefully let go?
What do I embolden more of?
The new social media wave
of how to be brave
about ageing
questions what we hide,
celebrates what we show.
And there is a difficult duplicity in this!
A double act
like a silver-tongued
perfoliate arrow
piercing the becomings
of my ousia,
of who I was
and am along the
curving of life.
* “Ousia: the Greek word ousia is a substantiation of “being” and is translated with “be”, “being” or “substance”. The term is applied to what remains constant on a subject under investigation, while certain properties change.” Philosophy Dictionary of Arguments
© Caterina Mastroianni
Caterina Mastroianni is a poet and educator living in Sydney on the land of the Cadigal and Wangal people of the Eora nation. She has published poetry in various literary magazines and four Australian anthologies, most recently in Burrow , Mediterranean Poetry, Honeyguide, The Ekphrastic Review, Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Magazine, Poetry for the Planet: An Anthology of Imagined Futures and Medium. https://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/A14153