GAS Featured Poet: Petra F. Bagnardi

 

Petra F. Bagnardi is a screenwriter and a poet. She was short-listed in the Enfield Poets' Twentieth Anniversary Poetry Competition, and her work was featured in several literary journals including, Masque & Spectacle Literary Journal, Punk Noir Magazine, Poetica Review, Drawn to the Light Press, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Redrosethorns Journal, Quail Bell Magazine, Ginosko Literary Journal.

Dimming lives

She deserves a different rite of passage.

She walks along the obsidian roads of the eternal city.

The facades of the buildings brim with arranged forms –

pure, sparkly and legendary.

The walls bear the names of all the women who got killed,

or raped, or both, that year.

She reads the story of the rivalry between Bernini and Borromini;

it produced a fountain of rivers and a temple for ivory prayers.

She knows about the violence against women in time of war.

She wonders about the silent battle endangering her gender –

so close, so factual, so unsentimental.

She trembles, even as her gaze lingers upon the feeble fires,

written on the masks of the marble masterpieces.

She deserves a new kind of coming of age story.

Writing a world

I am writing a world –

where the trenches are not made of thorny fire,

and the barricades are not ablaze with iron.

I'm writing a world of gentle walls of rain,

and silent flowery edges;

so that I can cross the emerald and cerulean distance,

which separates us –

easily, lovingly –

in a whisper of footsteps.

Regarding you, my words would not taste like poison.

We could hold one another without dirty guilt,

and the perception of dark judgement around us.

I'm writing this land, 

for the reality we inhabit declares us enemies;

and weapons rest at our doorsteps –

to be used against one another.

What I have learned

Perhaps it's the catastrophic world exploding around us –

it breeds spite, unkindness, violence.

We absorb and then reflect all the evil about.

We see a weakness and we soon use it against the unguarded.

Then questions shadow our every step –

Am I vulnerable?

Could I become a target?

I opened my heart too wide,

I gave too much and too easily.

I shroud my being in armor of caution and doubt;

I stop loving and giving and trusting –

even as bombs ravage my lemon and orange orchard.

It feels erroneous,

and I perceive the unfairness.

I have to study the pathway to avoid the landmines;

and still find a way to love my fellow souls –

without my heart getting crushed along the road.