Frank Samperi's A Remotis

A Remotis, published by Querencia Books, Seattle, 1979. Cover photograph by Mona Nagai. See Claudia Samperi-Warren at poetfranksamperi to read some of her father’s poems from this beautiful little book edited by John Levy.

The Three Stages of the World According to Monsanto

Where we find our indefatigable poetic muckraker plowing through the once-fruitful, now seedy lower forty only to find nothing out there standing but the husks of sodbusters stalked to death by a transmogrified jolly Green Giant.

A Spell of Evil

To all of us who have noticed that

Evil is live spelled backwards,

And to those who have not,

May we all live for the day

Evil becomes nothing

So much as its pale

Reflection in the mirror,

Duplicated to the letter,

Save for that most common

Ultimate one which insists

On remaining with its head

Twisted curiously

Looking the other way.

Mulberry Trees Taken by Storm in Winter

Startled

By a tremendous

Wave of starlings alighting,

Assuming shimmering myriad

Leaf-like shapes clinging to branches

Unnoticed because they were bare—

Now a thrumming insistence

Too wondrous to bear.

Paradise Lost in the Onslaught

Those halcyon days of yore?

So old they now seem

To have never existed before.