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.
Lone Tulip
for Phillip
Today those tulips your wife brought from Holland,
that I planted after you died,
burst into early Spring.
Rich red velvet robes, a yellow sun in a cup
and one that has yet to show its face,
to be delivered into this world.
She went away under a dark mantle of grief,
trying to escape the scent of you lingering in your home.
I can only imagine what is the still smell of someone no longer alive?
I watch from my window, a sentinel at the ready:
hurricane season, floods, blizzards,
tree down, mowed grass. She survived it all without you.
Earth turning over, everything aching
to push through the heavy weight of winter.
I sort debris from last year’s beds: twigs, leaves, plastic bag, a snakeskin.
My gaze returns to the lone tulip.
It has begun to unfurl its tight fist of resistance,
and I imagine it winks and bows to me.
I take a picture, send it to your wife with the caption:
“Your tulips are blooming, look at this one…I think it has his blue eyes.”
But I am looking for a sign that you have returned
to finish our last conversation at the mailbox
to smell the smoke of one of your cigars smoldering on the porch ashtray
or hear you sing through the open window,
Sinatra spinning on the upstairs turntable.
This August I am commemorating three specific events: my 25th wedding anniversary; the 20th anniversary of my father’s passing; and the one-year death anniversary of my dear neighbor Phillip to which this poem is dedicated.
When my husband, Michael, and I married in our backyard, the day was marked with the ending of a summer drought, then a torrential storm, a beautiful rainbow, and a house full of guests that had hoped to be eating outside under a big tent, and not on our living room floor. Five years later, during our 5th anniversary, when we were vacationing in Canada, my father passed away. It took two days to get home. And last year, I watched my neighbor’s wife frantically perform CPR to try to save her husband.
These anniversaries all come within days of each other and mark the mixed emotions of beginning a new life while honoring the end of another.
This poem is about how we try to live our lives within the loss of our loved ones. I say “within” and yet everything about the loss is “without.” I decided to compose this poem as if writing a letter to my friend Philip to let him know what is happening with us since he died. The poem attempts to highlight both ways of being: the fracturing by grief, and the wholeness from living in the present moment and what we notice as we move between them.
What details do we remember, what do we choose to believe about the departure of our loved ones? How do we cope with daily life? How do we celebrate our lives? And how might the presence of a solitary tulip planted in winter become a beacon of hope in early Spring?
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.