Joe Dolce: Four Poems

 

Colonel John Paul II

Who made Colonel Sanders (of the chicken) colonel?

Goateed, string-tied, linen-suited, paternal,

honorary title: Kentucky Colonel—

a two hundred year rollcall, in the journals,

of the Honorable Order of Kentucky Colonels.

Charles Stewart Todd was the first,

when his celebrated Kentucky Militia dispersed,

after victory in the War of 1812.

In recognition, he was given the helve,

and asked to stay, on the Governor’s behalf,

as personal bodyguard, member of Staff.

Joseph Bowles was the initial black,

African-American Colonel, on the plaque.

Later, Tiger Woods and Muhammad Ali

were invited to sit at the front of the trolley,

(ironically, Kentucky was the state, with the view,

in seventeen hundred and ninety-two,

to first legalize slavery, post-Revolution,

the very same year, admitted to the Union.)

Annie Poage was the first female guest,

a Lady Colonel; later, Mae West.

Other notable Colonels reckoned,

included Jim Beam, Pope John Paul Second,

W.C. Fields, John James Audubon,

Winston Churchill and Princess Anne.

In Louisiana and Kentucky, Elvis’s barker

was a double-colonel named Colonel Tom Parker.

(Though Elvis was anointed, down in Tennessee,

he never boasted, in public, his degree.)

In Australia and New Zealand, our closest brief

is the patron of the regiment, the Colonel-in-Chief,

a honorarium of tradition and loyalty,

and almost always a member of Royalty.

 

Joseph Jack and Mary Jill

Joseph Jack and Mary Jill

goeth up Golgotha Hill

to fetch a pail

of blood and nail.

Joe Dolce

St Rita of Cascia

Patroness of heartbroken women,

abused wives, impossible causes.

Attribute: bees—(the day after baptism,

a swarm of whites was observed

harmlessly entering and exiting her mouth).

Umbria-born, 1381,

married, age twelve,

first child, age twelve,

her violent husband

was stabbed to death

in a longtime feud between

the Chiqui and Mancini families.

Fearing revenge-killing, from her sons,

Rita petitioned God to give them

natural deaths—both dying, of dysentery,

within a year, saving them,

from the Mortal sin of murder, and Hell.

Admitted, conditionally,

to Monastery Saint Mary Magdalene,

if she could reconcile her two warring families,

which she achieved, at age thirty-six.

Three decades later, a weeping stigmata

appeared on her forehead, ascribed

to a Thorn from Christ’s Crown,

which she bore fifteen years

until death, bed-ridden, from tuberculosis.

Beatified, in 1626, by Urban VIII.

Canonized, in 1900, by Leo XII.

For a quincentennium,

her body has remained

incorrupt.

Joe Dolce

 

 

Rose White

The roses they grow tall, the petals do grow white,

often has their beauty paralyzed my sight,

her skin is much fairer that any rose’s white,

she’s older and soon we’ll be married.

Mother, O mother, you’ve wronged us, I fear,

you’ve promised me to a maiden twice my years,

I’m hardly changed from a boy into a man,

she’s older and soon we’ll be married.

Father, O father, please put me on a ship,

send me to sea, across the water deep,

that I might work and learn some manly trade,

before I’m consigned to be married.

Off the rocky coast, we met a terrible storm,

two years passed before I returned home,

childbed had taken my sister to her grave,

now we can never be married.

The roses they grow tall, the petals do grow white,

often has their beauty paralyzed my sight,

her skin was much paler than any rose’s white,

now we can never be married.