Joseph Bathanti’s poems are deeply rooted in personal history, place, and moral reflection, often drawing from his Italian-American heritage, Catholic upbringing, and life in the American South. His poetry blends narrative clarity with emotional intensity, telling stories that feel intimate yet socially aware. Bathanti writes with a strong sense of memory—family, faith, loss, guilt, and redemption frequently shape his poetic voice.
A former North Carolina Poet Laureate, Bathanti is known for his accessible language and confessional tone. His poems often explore working-class life, immigrant identity, and the struggle between spiritual belief and human imperfection. Rather than abstract symbolism, he favors vivid storytelling, allowing readers to enter lived moments filled with tension, compassion, and hard-earned wisdom.
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| Joseph bathanti |
Faith plays a central role in many of his poems, but it is never simplistic. Bathanti confronts doubt, sin, and suffering honestly, presenting spirituality as a lived, often painful experience. His work also reflects social consciousness, addressing themes such as justice, responsibility, and human dignity.
- What makes Joseph Bathanti’s poetry compelling is its sincerity. His poems do not seek to impress through complexity, but to connect through truth. With emotional restraint and moral clarity, Bathanti offers poetry that is grounded, humane, and resonant—capturing the quiet struggles and enduring hope of ordinary lives.
April Snow
The grass whelps in biblical mien –
mowers spend themselves –
a writ of greenest green,
spangled in sunbursts,
as if Van Gogh decided on
the remnant petrified thistle,
the first violets at his feet,
and painted Billings’ meadow.
Robins pompously swagger.
Swifts (little crosses)
jet above them. Birdsong.
Frog-song. Early spring
by habit exaggerates itself,
the green a blinding recognition.
To the ridge mount pines and firs.
Ancient hardwoods swell
by the day with bringing forth.
Blackberry whip the swales,
its cane shrove-purple
from the long winter.
In Sugar Grove, daffodils worship
on the abandoned Ruritan diamond.
Bases bleach in the dirt.
Home plate is a pentagon.
It forgets nothing.
Life is more than fable,
but never stops stunning earth.
And so: hushed clouds, sheepish,
sheep-shaped, yet foretold,
slip over Snake Den Mountain.
Their shadows blanket the valley floor.
The snow they release is inevitable.
This is how we must think of it –
inevitable – how we must welcome it,
the white behest of silence,
the green beneath it jade, milky.
Floyd County, Kentucky
No lintel to speak of,
but a chicken wire screen
door hinged on twelve-inch
block and lattice, jittering,
wind chimes knelling,
each time a charge grunts –
off-thunder rumbling the hollows.
The masonry had been sound;
shock split the seams: gashes
of mortar where it’s been repointed,
caulked sashes.
Number 2 pine gone ashy, fixing
to rot; the dooryard
held in a brazen of peonies,
rickety picket once-white
to corset them, pink-red
like the font in Luke
where Jesus says to John:
. . . the Son of Man hath not where to lay His Head.
Just inside hangs a woman’s shawl,
slick, see-through as onion skin;
maybe it’s parchment,
scrivened in bodement,
the letters gone to blood.
It can drive you to your knees:
how folks set out flowers
and look upon the earth.
Katy
After the first plane,
Katy phoned her brother.
She was safe, in another building.
They were evacuating. DJ thought
she had said the other building—
the South Tower—crashed into
by United Flight 175 at 9:03,
moments after the line went dead.
That’s all Katy’s mother, my sister,
Marie, could tell me when I called.
All we had to cling to:
a single syllable, separating another
from other, negligible, mere nuance;
but, in this case, the difference
between escape and incineration—
a seam notched for her in the secret ether,
should she stumble into it,
to pass through unharmed.
To cast wider our search,
Marie and I tuned to different networks,
watching for Katy among the fleeing hordes.
They had talked the night before
about what she’d wear to her client meeting:
a brown suit, a black bag; her black hair
was shorter since last I’d seen her.
All day I peered into the TV—punching
the cordless: Katy’s office, home, cell,
office, home, cell, over and over—scanning
faces unraveling diabolically
like smoldering newsreels, smeared
with hallucinatory smoke and ash.
They came in ranks, wave upon wave,
leagued across the avenues:
the diaspora into John’s Apocalypse.
Those still on their feet staggered.
Others lay in the street snarled
in writhing weirs of fire-hose.
The firmament had been napalmed:
orange-plumed, spooling black. Volcanic stench.
Somewhere beyond the screen,
inside that television from which we all, that day,
received, like communion, the new covenant,
for all time, was my niece in her brown suit
and new haircut, her purse—outfitted
for her seventh day in Manhattan,
her fourth day at the World Financial Center,
six days past her twenty-second birthday.
I would spy her, coax her back to us
through the TV’s lurid circuitry
into my living room. Our perfect girl,
my princess—she had lost her shoes—
wandering the skewered heart of the future—
finally arrived, black-hooded, afire,
eerily mute—toward the Upper East side:
a bus, a shared cab with an old man
who befriended her, then barefoot blocks
and blocks to her apartment on 89th Street
where she dialed her parents and announced
with the sacrificial modesty of saints
that she had made it home.
September Mourning
O limbo of life—
the wings dapple
mourning,
a twitter in the field,
color in the wind,
a spider on feet of purest gossamer.
Trust goes up in flames.
Girders
change
loved ones,
doors strange to touch,
all the lovely times
sinking
in the face of the steely plumes
breaking apart
brilliances
under the jet, so silver and
beautiful—
gone—
the going on
lifting
dreams
competing for truth
for dear life’s sake
holding the screams
held together by need.
Give me breath.
Cockleburs on an old man’s knees—
roses November leaves—
the memory of this place
catches us
off center
loses hold
and holds to nothing,
the world seeming
seamless
days of glory,
a tapestry
of women and men
dawdling
and scuffling their
shoes, eyeing their toes,
knowing there is nothing to say
that might lighten the load
turning around, coming back, onward,
never to finish telling the story
numb in the name
of the fluttering flag
o say can the tattered one
defend the fences fenced around
and in and through this century of all times
the way a baby’s wrapped in a shawl or shirt for the
tucking into the arms
clutching dear life so thin
the stubborn holding on
a giving in
