One Year, 52 Haikus (With Photos)

I've posted an original haiku with an original photo every Monday for the past 52 weeks. I post these on my Instagram account - and you can view the past year below:

Two Prompts, Two Poems

Like a parlor trick, I can produce poetry on demand. Not good poetry, mind you -- but something approaching poetic structure.

This weekend, I attended a workshop by a real poet, Dante Di Stefano, sponsored by the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College (that's a lot of Ps and Cs!).

The first prompt: write a "cover version" of a well-known song, movie, TV show, poem... etc. Something that imitates, references or pays homage to the original. I thought of the times I read my daughters to sleep reciting poetry, and wrote this:

Annabel Lee

It was many and many a year ago,

When I used to read you to sleep

You never understood

The meaning of the words

But the words had meaning to me

The words had meaning to me

As I watched you drift into sleep

And I dreamed of your dreams

And our time seemed to flee,

Seemed to flee

As I read you to sleep

Now years seem to flee

As I think of you here,

Near this empty bed,

Where you no longer sleep

So far from me now,

So far from our dreams,

Entombed by the memories I keep.

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The second prompt: Write something titled "Self Portrait As a XXX"

I considered my trusty "Starry Night" notebook and lucky St. Patrick's Cathedral pen, and decided to write something inspired by Van Gogh's famous self-portrait, with his left ear bandaged. I symbolically cut off the left portion of my keyboard and wrote something that didn't use the letters q, w, a, s, z, x or the number s 1 or 2:

Self Portrait as a Poet

Help me!

Help my poem!

Help it live!

Yet…

I found your letter.

I found hope in my reply.

Think of me.

I think of you too.

I love your poetry.

You found me differently.

Published Poem: 'Vanishing Garden'

T'Monde performing in Madison NJ in September

Cajun Haiku

A world full of woe.

When the band begins to play,

We dance anyway.

 

Yesterday I read one of my poems published in "And Still We Dance," a journal representing the work of the Writing LAB Ekphrastic Residency, sponsored by ARTS By The People and the Santiago Abut Foundation.

We had originally gathered in September at the Madison (NJ) Community Arts Center to hear Cajun music performed by a talented trio from Louisiana: T'Monde.

Their music inspired the published poetry, which was edited by the event's organizer, the poet Michelle Ortega. In the book, each poem was accompanied by a sketch by artist Anna Hershinow, with a bar code linking to the T-Monde song that inspired the poem.

I wrote my poem, "Vanishing Garden," after spending time in October with T'Monde's a cappella rendition of "La Belle S'en Va." In addition, Michelle kindly published a poem, "A Bouquet From Louisiana in 12 Couplets," that I wrote while hearing the trio perform in September.

Vanishing Garden

 

I stand in this garden

where everything vanishes.

 

Dad in his Navy blues,

an arm around his first and only love:

Mom, with Ava-Gardner-red lips,

under a canopy of vines plump with grapes.

 

Lips... redder than the nesting cardinals,

or the roses woven into the chain-link fence

where my daughter posed with a bouquet

in her First Communion dress.

 

A dress... whiter than the worn milking stool

where Nonna shucked corn

and split pea pods with her penknife,

while humming Rogers and Hammerstein.

 

I stand in this garden

where everything vanishes.

 

Crows descend.

Bees disappear, then roses.

Rust erodes the fence.

The well runs dry.

 

Only the music never dies.

The night wind echoes in an a cappella

of haunting ancient words

whose meaning I don't understand.

 

What's the use of wondering?

This ghostly ballad comforts me.

Although everything has vanished,

I am not alone.

 

I stand in this garden

surrounded by angels.

---------

 

A Bouquet From Louisiana in 12 Couplets

 

This is the music of misery.

Sad songs, made for dancing.

 

I recognize the urgency of longing,

Although I can’t dance.

 

This ceaseless steady beat,

So unlike my arrhythmic heart.

 

This dead language,

Preserved in melody and harmony.

 

These words, made for heart-break,

In a language I can’t translate.

 

This is the music of

One-sided stories of obsessive love.

 

I know those stories.

I feel like I can play along.

 

This is the music of 

The abandoned father and husband:

 

“One would hope

They thought he was dead.”

 

An accordion missing five notes,

A fiddle, a full-bodied guitar in autumn brown.

 

A chill fills the room

As the trio begins to play.

 

This is a harsh waltz.

How hard it is to live.

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PS - I post an original haiku every Monday paired with one of my photos at @bvarphotos on Instagram. 

Mother Cabrini, Mother Cabrini...

Cardinal Dolan, seated next to Rev. Dr. Gilford T. Monrose of the NYC
Mayor’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Partnerships

You CAN go home again. This week I attended a convening of healthcare leaders sponsored by my former employer, the Mother Cabrini Health Foundation. Sony Hall in the NYC Theater District was packed, and I was blessed to see so many friends / former colleagues there… and inspired by the program.

“Unprecedented times” was a theme of the day, and MCHF’s Channon Lucas issued a call for “radical empathy” and later introduced CEO Msgr. Greg Mustaciuolo, who closed the day citing the importance of persistence and perseverance. (See https://lnkd.in/eecU88Wz for his recent City & State interview.)

A highlight for me among the speakers was Cardinal Dolan, who talked about the inherent dignity and worth of every person, and the importance of faith in providing people with hope.

The cardinal also talked about Mother Cabrini’s life of service, and he couldn’t resist citing the New York folklore of invoking her name when trying to find a parking space in the city: “Mother Cabrini, Mother Cabrini, please find a spot for my little machiney!”

Press enter or click to view image in full siz

Greetings From the Paterson Poetry Festival

Last year at the festival. Great Falls Park was closed this year, due to the government shutdown, so yesterday's "Words Around the World" event was held indoors.

Yesterday, I checked off a literary bucket list item: I read at the Paterson Poetry Festival. The event was "Words Around the World," hosted by Yves-Mary Fontin, a board member of Wordseed, the local organization that organizes the festival.

Yves-Mary Fontin setting up the event's livestream.
Thank you, Radio Tele Xfm, for the screen cap below.

Normally, Words Around the World is held on stage in front of the Paterson Great Falls, a site I love to visit. But, with the shutdown of the federal government, the national historic park was closed, and the event was moved indoors to another site I love to visit, the nearby Paterson Museum.

Yesterday's event -- there's an entire month of October festival activities posted online -- celebrated diverse voices in several languages. This included, among many others, incredibly talented Wordseed poets. You can find them in the bio section of the organization's site, including Paterson's poet laureate, Talena Lachelle Queen.

I gave it my best shot with three poems set in New Jersey, where I've lived my whole life except for a few years in Manhattan and South Bend, Ind. I wore a rugby shirt from McGovern's Tavern in Newark (another favorite site!). The front features the immortal words of humorist Jean Shepherd, "In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash," and the back features the Notre Dame Fighting Irish leprechaun.

The poems I read yesterday are set in Paterson, my hometown of New Milford, and the Pine Barrens. Two are updated from previous posts here because I always seem to tinker with my poems to try to keep them alive:

Scenic Overlook at Garret Mountain

This is a dangerous place to stand:

Cliffside in Paterson,

In the descending dusk.

 

In the view past the highway at my feet,

In the horizon of the New York skyline,

I behold a dizzying sight:

 

I see a housefly alight on your thigh.

It's 40 years ago, yet I can clearly see you

Languidly napping in our old bedroom

 

In a high-rise apartment miles away,

Through a window of space and time,

So many years since you left my side.

 

The housefly rubs its hands, obsessed,

Plotting its next move,

Until shooed in a flash

 

By a dismissive twitch of your flesh.

Decades disappear, just as fast,

As cars on Route 80 flee to the west.

 

Like a Dutch sailor, I face to the east.

Blinding, orgastic city lights hide ghosts

That whisper among the vanished trees.

 

I catch my breath on this precipice,

Its wounds, like mine,

Dark and deep.

 

40 years later,

Cliffside in Paterson,

I still watch you while you sleep.

 

---------

 

Things to Do When You’re Invisible

I nurse a shaved ice in a booth at Kailani’s

Behind a cloak of invisibility.

The Korean girl in her summer clothes

Stole the attention of the high school boy behind the counter

After he dutifully took my order, shaped it, imbued it in red,

Preparing the first shaved ice I will ever try.

 

Nobody cares.

I am old, while everything around me is anime and new.

I am an NPC in this game of boy meets girl.

When I was a newbie,

I thought invisibility, the ability to be willful without consequence,

Was the greatest superpower.

 

I know better now.

I tip my iPhone toward my bowl of unfreezing, bleeding ice.

I take its photo, ensuring a focus

On the melting of memory, the mining of the sublime.

This is the superpower I have come to possess:

Ensnaring evanescence.

 

When I take a photo...

Or write a poem...

I activate God Mode.

Not only invisible;

I am invincible.

I can stop time.

---------

Burlington County, 1984 

Driving up the Jersey Turnpike,

Skirting a million acres of acidic, sandy soil.

It’s almost dawn.

 

In the passenger’s seat next to me

Hester closes her eyes, adjusts the halo

Embroidered atop her California Angels cap,

And burrows under my letter jacket with a breathless sigh.

 

Bright Venus and the rising sun combine to accent

The needles of the pines lining the highway,

Casting shadows that flicker and tremble.

Like my desire.

 

I wish I may, I wish I might, now,

Make the sun stand still

Below that distant horizon.

 

Af if my car were a Mason jar.

As if I could punch air holes in the top

And examine this curiosity named Hester

Lazily stretching her butterfly limbs.

 

I would take my car in my hand

And hold the both of us up

To that faint and heavenly light.

 

This tiny version of myself I am trying to preserve

Is me at my best, oblivious in young love…

Blissfully teased by the Hand of Fate:

Tentative knuckles, resting lightly on my thigh.

 

As if, in Hester's lifeline,

I could divine our future together...

As if I weren’t the Jersey Devil in disguise.

Greetings From Notre Dame: A Letter Sent in 1978

My clever, younger, and faraway best friend Kathy Connelly -- who graduated a year behind me at Notre Dame -- forwarded an email from Gray Nocjar, ND Class of 2027 and current managing editor of the university's student newspaper, The Observer.

Gray addressed his note to past Observer leaders (leaving me out since, sigh, I was a lowly reporter and copy editor), noting that this fall marks The Observer's 60th anniversary. He is compiling an anecdotal history of the paper, calling on us to "take up the mantle again and write one last story for their newspaper."

So here goes: one last Observer story by Bob Varettoni (aka "Scoop," as my Pangborn Hall dormmates called me).

---------

It was a dark and stormy night in Totowa, N.J. Suddenly, a shout rang out.

It was my mother, on the eve of my 22nd birthday. "Bobby," she said, "this came in the mail today." She hurled a cardboard tube up the stairs. The return address, written in the block type of a kidnapper: PO Box Q, Notre Dame, Ind.

Inside was a continuous, 12-foot scroll of yellow copy paper that had been left in a manual typewriter in The Observer's newsroom in September 1978... for anyone on staff to contribute to a birthday letter to me. I had graduated four months earlier, and I was homesick for everyone I had left behind in Indiana.

When I edited copy for The Observer, I would often, late in the evenings, leave a roll of paper in a random typewriter and start a rambling note (often beginning, like the cartoon-character Snoopy, "It was a dark and stormy night...") about my existential worries and non-existent love life (where, in the parlance of "Peanuts," I was always a chump).

So the staff kept that tradition alive for another month. Reading their birthday letter 47 years later is like traveling back in time. It's filled with the musings of future journalists and lawyers and business leaders who were stressed-out, overworked, overwhelmed, and paradoxically having the best times of their lives.

What was it like to work on The Observer staff in 1978? Here are 10 clues:

• "God help us, Diane, barefooted, said 20 minutes ago that she was going to leave and go home and get some sleep. That's the way it always starts, you know..."
• "Keith Moon is dead... Life won't be the same anymore."
• "The editorial layout guy is weird. I think he is a cucumber."
• "I hope the night editor can get the paper out without having a heart attack. He's in the other room, cussing Odland under his breath for making this issue 24 pages long."
• "Well, here I am again typing to you before I bite the big one and end up going to class."
• "I tried out for 'You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown' the other night, and made a fool of myself in the process. I tried out for one part but got another when I pretended I was talking to you, and the bitchiness came out just right."
• "You know what? This paper is shifting to the left. When I set the margins on Sunday they were at 20 and 80. Now they are at 15 and 74. From Sunday to today makes five days, so that's an average of one space per day. At that rate, we will fall into the Pacific Ocean in about 2 billion years, long after California has sunk beneath the waves."
• "We wrote not one but two ed's tonight on Dean Roemer's new Alcohol Directive, which is intended to stop campus alcoholism. It's the latest controversy on campus. The latest amusement too. It equals last year's issue of Al Hunter's suspension."
• "I want to put Tide in the Crossroads Fountain and watch the bubbles."
• "I go to the Grotto every night at midnight -- just to check. I mean you never know who'll be there, right? I'm sitting up here and everyone else is working and I'm not. Maybe if I type fast, everyone will think I'm busy working too. Oh, by the way, you do know who this is, don't you? Of course you do. I mean who else searches empty grottos? We miss you here, Bob."

I miss you too, Ann. I miss everybody.

A favorite part of the letter was from Tim Joyce, "the ace copyreader on this godforsaken rag tonight." He was writing at 11:30 on a Wednesday night, a half hour before his 20th birthday.

"What a hell of a way to start off the best years of my life," Tim wrote. He heard I lived in New Jersey, which is where he lived before he left for the fall semester 10 days prior: "that state where the grass is green, the air is clean, and the slot machines will wipe you clean." He advised me to look up a Jersey Shore bar band called Holme.

"At least in N.J. they let you drink beer out of kegs," he added. "Dean Roemer just issued an order to confiscate all kegs at student tailgaters this Saturday. What a goddamn killjoy. Well, it's almost 12 now, and my teenage years are just a few ticks left on the clock."

Just now in 2025, I checked to see that, incredibly, Holme still plays rock 'n roll classics at D'Jais Bar in Belmar. Their 7 p.m. shows have no cover... and, I think, this birthday week I will pay a visit D'Jais and raise a glass to Tim, and to the memory of Dean Roemer, and to all the wonderful people who included their names in this letter I treasure, this fading yellow scroll in the drawer of my nightstand in New Jersey.

Thank you to all who wrote -- Kathy and Tim, and Phil Cackley, Ann Gales, Diane Wilson, Barb Langhenry, Barbara ("B. not L.") Block, Mare Ulicny, Rosemary Mills, Mike ("you know, the short guy… thin mustache… oh well, forget it") Lewis, Dan Letcher, Maribeth Moran ("your last year, loving day editor"), Mark Rust, Steve Odland, and Frank Kebe.

I'm sorry it's taken me so long to get back to you.

---------

PS -- Thank you, too, for the personal ads that appeared in The Observer that birthday week, which I don't remember (or wanted to forget) seeing before now... but which are somehow available forever in the paper's online archive.