Jay Licata Haiku

Found silk in the night

Cacooned sweetly into Spring

Back up the mountain.

Amongst the Moons...

...and the seasons of our lives
When time has swept us up
And swept us along
Like leaves in a windstorm,

We will have wept
And wished we’d kept
Time dust in our pockets,
Hearts and lockets.

For in too many moons
That have circled us by,
We will have drawn
The breath and sigh
Of memory and memoir
And cloud climbers in the sky.

For I meant to return
But lent the moment
To moon watching
And wonderment
Onto wandering quests

Of coming home
To the Camelot we knew
Where upon breezes lush
A lover's hush fades upon an echo
And the lyrical remembrance of you.

Venice and Summer Nights ( Venice Non Solo Amore Ma Vino )

Venice
We will be there
Talking love and drinking wine
Far into the soft,
Summer Venetian nights

Enchanting and lush
In the exotic juxtapose,
Centuries of ambiance
And the Italian Rose -

White and red the montage -
The collage of moon petals 
Upon canals of satiny and silk,

The White Roses of Santa Barbara,
And the Red Roses of the heart.
 

Come Late Sunday Afternoon

Late Sunday Afternoon

On a chair in the backyard,

Leaned up against the garage

Facing my vegetable garden,

Glass of wine in hand

Listening to the opera

Loud and Italian -

The opera Pagliacci

Old Caruso record -

Aria -Vesti La Guibba

Drinking the wine

And rose water

Of lost love

And sweet remembrance

Of children wished to have had

In pictures from the long ago,

In the gray shades

Of lost passions never shared

And the destiny and fate

That seemed not

To have cared.

Still in daydreams

I walked with her

And sang to her,

Yet this is how i fared...

Long Questing The Longing For Love

In long questing
The Longing for love -
Supercilious is tedium

For by middle life
We come to know -
Title and gold will wait
An eternity at heaven's gate

As dances of chance
Dapples our last chapters
With a great love or lesser -
Love's long story nonetheless

Starting out as children

Ending much the same

With an in between 
Of mostly puff and veneer,

Save for the patina
Of our altruism

And humanism,
 
Which we gathered

Within a less than ideal life,

And lived out
In less than a perfect world.

Therefore the quest

To glimpse the colors
Of love in Autumn

The glimmer of lodestones
Glinting in the midst of Winter, 
Reflecting in your eyes

As I pass this place
And have this joy
To brace me
Amongst the shifting sands
In the lands of timeless space.

 

Centuries ago...

...we pressed together,

Shoulder to shoulder
And ran the rivers of diaspora,
When the inquisition
Came to Spain.

And from pogroms of pain,
My Tuscan soul, Iberian heart,
Knew not the wet
Of tears from rain,

For as fearful lovers,
We ran the rivers
To the Mediterranean,

Yet bid goodbye,
Your fathers
To the coasts of Africa,
And mine to Corsica

Where brilliant white,
The Trumpeter Swan,
Against the bluest sky,
Called out to Abraham
And freedom's cry
And promised us
We'd meet again,

If only hundreds of years
Of wingbeats and heartbeats later,
When the kismet birds of destiny,
Circle with the Trumpeter,
Windswept, above the clouds,
And in the heavens of Seattle.