red geraniums

burnt sienna apartment buildings rise above the piazza
blue shuttered windows, opened in the summer light

ledges fringed with red geraniums tended by housebound tenants
their ancestry from mountain farms and valley fields

here in their urban gardens, 
reduced to single terra cotta pots

they dip their hands in the contained earth
dreaming of sowing and harvests

and the blood call of roots.

Joseph A Farina is a retired lawyer in Sarnia, Ontario, Canada. An award-winning poet. Several of his poems have been published in Quills Canadian Poetry Magazine, Ascent, Subterranean Blue and in   The Tower Poetry Magazine, Inscribed, The Windsor Review, Boxcar Poetry Revue, and appears in the anthology   Sweet Lemons: Writings with a Sicilian Accent, in the anthology Witness from Serengeti Press and Tamaracks: Canadian Poetry for the 21st Century. He has had poems published in the U.S. magazines   Mobius, Pyramid Arts, Arabesques, Fiele-Festa, Philadelphia Poets and   Memoir (and) as well as in Silver Birch Press “Me, at Seventeen” Series. He has had two books of poetry published— The Cancer Chronicles   and   The Ghosts of Water Street.

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