The Mad Poet of the Year blog posts share the poetry of a long-time Mad Poet. This year-long appointment provides readers with a deep dive of the writer’s work and thoughts on poetry. We are thrilled to have Lisa DeVuono serve as the Mad Poet of the Year for 2024.
Cento: Refugees
from The Tiny Journalist by Naomi Shihab Nye
The moon sees us.
We are outdated shrines,
many orphans
from the pavement of neglect.
Forgotten perimeter
Around the edge of winter
in its camouflage of grief
Our voices pour out
through a hole in the floor.
Where is the door to our story?
How will we sing our names?
From the solitude of bruises
to the tight throat of alert.
Where is our lucky number?
A word is brave --
we never know how far
a voice can travel.
Life has loveliness to sell,
Blue waves whitened on a cliff,
Who will be left to enter the calligraphy of joy?
Nothing to give you
that you would want.Nothing big enough
but freedom.
-- “Tiny Journalist Blues” by Naomi Shihab Nye
When I think of the month of July, I think of summer memories in Northeast Philly: BBQs, badminton, and block parties; vacation reading club at Bushrod library; tennis at Tarken playground, swimming at Max Myers; penny candy at Woolworths; weekends at my uncle’s bungalow near Tullytown; the annual shore trip to Rosalinda’s in North Wildwood.
The 4th of July was always about family and neighbors coming together and celebrating our country’s ideals, our hopes to be better, do better. The day culminated in fireworks where we watched them at the elementary school where you could see them over the treetops by the Jewish Cemetery.
These were yearly adventures and daily freedoms we innocent children could count on and often took for granted. As adults, in today’s world, we can no longer rest comfortably in our nostalgia, waxing romantic about the good old days.
This month, I am posting my print and poem “Refugees.” It’s a cento form in which lines are borrowed from other poems to construct something new. These lines were collected from “The Tiny Journalist” (2019) by Naomi Shihab Nye whose poems draw on her experiences as a Palestinian-American living in the Middle East, her father, and from the Facebook postings of teenager Janna Jihad Ayyad who shared her personal journey of living under conflict.
Shihab Nye is my favorite poet and I was so moved by this collection of truth telling. While I often flinched, these poems also softened my heart and helped me choose and arrange words that told the story of the impact on refugees; that created something from this witnessing -- a sense of urgency and expression for those whose voices are silenced or made to feel invisible. I chose lines with questions so that the reader might ponder their own lives in contrast with so many people who are still living in poverty and war, struggling to survive, let alone build childhood memories.
With the 250th anniversary of 1776 just two years away, I (like so many others) find myself worried and anxious about our freedom: who fought for it, for what reasons, who has it, who doesn’t. Last month, my poem “Coming to America” highlighted my own family immigration story and the challenges of leaving one’s country to find a better life. America represented freedom and opportunity for many immigrants and refugees.
How many personal and collective sacrifices were made over the years, and what must happen to ensure the preservation of our rights, over and over again? This poem seeks to highlight the crisis of individuals, families, nations still fighting for their freedoms, still looking for a free and safe haven.
I can’t help but ask the same of us this July. Is America still that place?
Lisa DeVuono is the 2024 Poet Laureate of Montgomery County. She was one of the founders of It Ain’t Pretty, a women’s writing collective that performed locally. She produced multi-media shows incorporating song, music, poetry, and dance, including Rumi in Song at the Sedgwick Theater; and Whole Heart Home, and Breaking Open Breaking Free, part of the IceHouse Tonight series in Bethlehem.
She led creativity and poetry workshops and has worked with teens in recovery and cancer patients. She wrote a peer-based curriculum Poetry as a Tool for Recovery: An Easy-to-Use Guide in Eight Sessions for facilitators working with persons living with mental health challenges.
In addition to the full-length manuscript This Time Roots, Next Time Wings, her poetry has appeared in the Mad Poets Review, Paterson Literary Review and the anthology Grit Gravity & Grace: New Poems about Medicine and Healthcare. She is the author of the chapbook Poems from the Playground of Risk published by Pudding House Press and was the recipient of an honorable mention in Passaic County Community College’s annual Allen Ginsberg Contest.
Recently retired, she has worked as an administrator, librarian, and lay chaplain.