Maria Mazziotti Gillan

Maria Mazziotti Gillan

Maria Mazziotti Gillan is a recipient of the 2014 George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature from AWP, the 2011 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award from Poets & Writers, and the 2008 American Book Award for her book, All That Lies Between Us (Guernica Editions).

She is the founder /executive director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in Paterson, NJ, and editor of the Paterson Literary Review. She is also a Bartle Professor and Professor Emerita of English and creative writing at Binghamton University-SUNY.

She has published twenty-four books. Her most recent books are When the Stars Were Still Visible (Stephen F.Austin State University Press, 2021), the poetry and photography collaboration with Mark Hillringhouse, Paterson Light and Shadow (Serving House Books, 2017) and the poetry collection What Blooms in Winter (NYQ Books 2016.) Others include The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets (Cat in the Sun Books, 2014); Ancestors’ Song (Bordighera Press, 2013); The Silence in an Empty House (NYQ Books, 2013); Writing Poetry to Save Your Life: How to Find the Courage to Tell Your Stories (MiroLand, Guernica Editions, 2013); The Place I Call Home (NYQ Books, 2012); and What We Pass On: Collected Poems 1980-2009 (Guernica Editions, 2010). She is co-editor of four anthologies with her daughter, Jennifer.

Visit her websites:

Poetry website: www.mariagillan.com
Poetry Blog: mariagillan.blogspot.com
Artist website: mariamazziottigillan.com

 
The Sky in San Mauro

The sky in San Mauro turns mauve
over the Mediterranean, visible
at the base of the mountain
on which I stand
and the air rushes past gnarled fig trees
and graceful ones bent like dancers
under the weight of large lemons,
the air fragrant with the scent of dark, rich earth,
the tang of rosemary and lavender.

Standing here looking out over so much open space,
I feel buoyant as if my feet
were no longer bound to the earth. I think

of my ordinary life,
my appointment book so full it is difficult to read,
no time for this incredible stillness,
which I wrap around me now in San Mauro
like a silk shawl,

of my every day, a list of things I must do
until I too am bent, under the weight
of so many people who need me,

of my desk covered in books to be reviewed,
letters to be answered, programs to plan,
so this moment, this blessed moment

when I can breathe in the clean mountain air,
this moment, a salve on burned skin,
this moment, a treasure I will carry with me
to remind me how fortunate I am,
just to pause, to breathe this glorious air.

—Italian Americana February 2016

 
When I Think of This Summer

In San Mauro, that southern Italian town in Cilento,
where you grew up,
I imagine I could still see
the amazing vistas,
the hill towns and their houses
that look like monopoly houses strung
along a mountain, the sky vast
and the Mediterranean Sea miles below
the curvy mountain roads.

I try to imagine you as a little girl
walking the cobblestone streets
and sitting on the balcony of your house
to watch the clouds skitter across the sky,
the storm that rolls
in over the sea. I imagine
you loving the openness of living
on top of the mountain, watching
the stars in that enormous sky,
imagine that once,
when you were very young perhaps,
you had time for dreaming.

But after third grade you had to leave
school and you became the cook
for your family of nine. You’d serve
everyone breakfast, pack a lunch for them,
and after they left the stone house
you’d get dinner ready
and climb the steep mountain to the fields
where you worked all day beside your family.
At night, you’d leave first, because the sky
was starting to darken, so you would be home
to finish preparing dinner.
“I was nine years old,” you told me,
“and sometimes I was afraid walking down
the mountain by myself, and once an old man
tried to grab me but I ran away.”

Today in this town that I have come to love,
I conjure my mother up, wish for her a life
of leisure and plenty she never had,
wish she could join us here at the San Mauro
bed and breakfast, called Magico Orizzonte,
and where we would breathe in the mountain air,
clear and clean as water, where my grandson says
what I’ve been thinking: “It makes me feel so free.”

—What Blooms in Winter 2016

 
Poetry in this post: © Maria Mazziotti Gillan
Published with the permission of Maria Mazziotti Gillan