Sometimes I Swear In Italian

Sometimes I Swear In Italian

By Anthony Buccino

Anthony Buccino's collection Sometimes I Swear In Italian is about growing up Italian American in New Jersey, discovering the roots of his ancestors.

Read about the old neighborhood where the 'bianca lina' man sold bleach to make the white linens, the young boy growing up in the house his grandfather built, and living upstairs from his scary grandma who spoke no English.

This American boy discovers the land his ancestors left to make a better life for him and his generation. The pigeons that follow him throughout Italy provide the connection to his father - who raised homers - who didn't speak English until he started school - the rich heritage of the old country, and the enormous sacrifice of his grandparents.

Despite its title, Sometimes I Swear In Italian contains no profanity in any language.

More about the collection

ON MY SHOES

Pompeii, Italy

Horses pulled carts down these ancient streets
Rocks and trenches, uncovered now
After centuries of mystical curses
There you see the woodless rooms
On these dusty roadways so old
It rained a torrent in the streets of Pompeii
Here, in the middle of narrow streets
You see stepping stones to cross in floods
And troughs centuries old that wagons rode
Yet the brothel mosaics are almost fresh
After ages of heat and dust on this old mountainside
Long gone is the rumored second floor.
Once this was a kitchen, that a bedroom.
These shelled out, roofless rock caves
Where glassless windows grasped the slightest breeze.
This was Pompeii, in Campania, Italy,
The rich sea brought sailors and good times and riches
Until everything perished under stinging soot.
Under the recreated mummified remains
The dusty brown hound sleeps and dreams of what?
Does he see the ghosts of this terrible nightmare?
Or does he dream doggy dreams of strangers with food?
Hours later we entered Roma weary from our travels
Walk past foreign graffiti into the high class hotel
On my black shoes, the dust of Pompeii

-- Copyright © 2010 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved. Photos and content may not be used for commercial purposes without written permission.

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Sometimes I Swear In Italian by Anthony Buccino
in print and on Kindle

RAIN IN PISA

Pisa, Italy

It wasn’t the rain
That made the tower lean
And if you’re wondering
I didn’t do it.
It was like that
When I got here.
Umbrellas and cameras
As everybody stood turn
Holding from a distance
The leaning tower
While we sashayed
Through the ancient arch
And had caffe across
From the Cinese
Restaurant in Pisa.

-- Copyright © 2010 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved. Photos and content may not be used for commercial purposes without written permission.

MONEY IN NEWSPAPERS

Gless Avenue, Belleville, N.J.

The neat stacks of old newspapers
might have led you to believe
that Gramma intended to read
the rooms full of back issues
and headlines of earlier years
or she planned to write
her life story based on news events.
But Gramma could not read
though she could figure
and track your rent payments
these English words were a big blur
and the future not all that much better.
Gramma Silverhair had her reasons
for filling up rooms
with old newspapers she would never read.
It was all about the numbers
she would tell herself and no one else.
For in her old age
she trusted no one beyond herself.
Gramma grew all she needed in her yard there
with the grapevines and fig trees
and the chickens, the eggs and all.
The many cats had kittens
and she drowned the ones she had to
and left the rest to kill the mice.
On the back porch in the Garden State air
she dried green, orange
and yellow speckled gourds
and when we shook them,
the seeds inside rattled like castanets.
The fresh cool water from two hand-dug wells
lost its worth, its importance in daily life
when the town water came into the house.
It might have been needed some day
with all the papers there.
Those old newspapers held so
precious to her heart, left behind
when she died, the dollar bills fell out.

- By Anthony Buccino
from SIXTEEN INCHES ON CENTER
Copyright © 2010 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved.

NEEDLE

Gless Avenue, Belleville, N.J.

We lived the cliché: Grandma downstairs
without a word of English;
Children frightened by the needle
she proffered and the thread;
And by the big old woman, herself
whose strange breath and odd teeth
and white-yellow hair
framed her large nose and haggard face;
She cornered the little girls – my sister
and two cousins on the stairs
as they tried to pass by in play,
talking in a gibberish tongue
thrusting a needle at their eye
as a thread danced in the breeze,
a kite tail without its cross ties,
held tightly in the swollen,
battered, stuttering old hand.
What she wanted must be so obvious.

- By Anthony Buccino
From SIXTEEN INCHES ON CENTER
From AMERICAN BOY: Pushing Sixty
Copyright © 2010 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved.

Book covers

Most of the poems on this site have been collected in one or more of the following books.

Copyright © 2010 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved. Photos and content may not be used for commercial purposes without written permission.