Poetry Performed Episode 037 - Waiting or Temporary by Joel Ciaccio

Poetry Performed Episode 037 - Waiting or Temporary by Joel Ciaccio



This week, we feature a poem from the host of the HACK Sessions podcast, Joel Ciaccio. It is titled “Waiting or Temporary”.

Before we get to this week’s poem, I want to invite all of the poets out there to head to our site, poemsandshorts.blogspot.com. From there, you can submit your poem for consideration on a future episode. While I love working my way through the deep historical catalogue of poetry, I know it is a living art form, and I want to feature as many living poets as possible. Now, on to this week’s poem.


Waiting or Temporary by Joel Ciaccio
This moment is perfect.
This feeling is familiar, ancient even.
Transfixed by the electricity of this temporal reprieve,
I surrender to the sun and the way its rays meet me here.
Traveling a distance that I have no right to claim that I comprehend.
Refracted god knows how many times along the way.
Highlighting bands of air before me, the sun reveals the smallest visible diamonds dancing.
Illuminating and coloring the space that I take for granted
and the time that no clock can tick fast enough to keep up with.
In this moment I am suspended, weightless, grounded.

This moment is lavishly generous.
Showering me with more air than I am able to breathe in.
Swimming in a capsule contained within imminent asphyxiation.
Saturating my sight to the brink of blindness.
Warming my skin.
Rousing my soul.
Dissolving my inhibitions.

This moment is a courtship.
A dance ad infinitum.
The imprecision of my posture wanes to this perennial partner’s dips and turns
As if movement and stillness are the same thing.

This moment is a consummation.
A transubstantiation of awareness and time immemorial
becoming all around me.
From the ordinary there is an extraction.
Ordained regal common presence
Extra-ordinary without abstraction
From this moment there is no distraction.
There is no distinction, all things are one.
All things are whole.
In this moment, I am betrothed.

This is where I touch eternity, or at least eternity’s touching me.
And like the light’s journey, the infinite is something that, in conceit,
I deign to have some authority.
But that doesn’t matter.
And that’s why this moment is perfect.
This moment is waiting or temporary.

That was “Waiting or Temporary” by Joel Ciacci. Joel Ciaccio is a poet and host of a poetry potluck podcast called HACK sessions, where each episode he and a guest both bring a poem to pass for discussion. He is a professional musician in the Baltimore/DC area where he has lived for the last 13 years. He is originally from Pennsylvania and his primary creative inspirations are traveling and drinking coffee to the brink of heart failure.

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