Serpari: Selected Poetry and Prose

By Stephen R. Galati

Stephen R. Galatis engaging new collection of poetry and prose provides a sometimes musical, sometimes bold view of emotional transformation. The poems and short fiction are reflective and candid, and take us through lifes hidden passageways that guide us from the point of hardship to the moment of healing. Themes of nature, love, pain, and loss are addressed through metaphor and honesty in his prose and in such poems as Farewell Like the Autumn Leaf, While She Sleeps, and When You Are Done. This is a wonderfully enlightening collection from one of todays great new voices.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Nov 28, 2002
• ISBN: 9781469728407

Stephen R. Galati

Stephen Robert Galati is the author of Looking Toward Pleiades, a collection of traditional verse. He has published articles, poems and prose in numerous online and print publications. A technical writer and a former columnist for About.com, he lives with his wife and four children in Brooklyn, New York.

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Contents

Introduction

Part I

The Solemn Mississippi

The Aquarian

As the Wind Turns Cold

Celia

Chicago 1871

Misunderstood

The Shade From Trees

The Wayward Queen

Dreams of a Father

Night Guide

A Wish to the Fountain

The Dirigible Hindenburg

The Comet

How Do Thee Lust?

Farewell Like the Autumn Leaf

Footsteps Echo Through the Trees

Sonnet #2: While She Sleeps

Natural Beauty

The Clocksmith

Within Arm’s Length

A Rondeau to Sam

Chattel

Demons of Delight

Nature

For J

The Apparition of Life

He Was a Dreamer

The Shepherd

My Mind Stops Me Midway

When You Are Done

A Conformist

A Summer Day

With Due Respect

Joined

Half Virgin

Oklahoma City

Two

Praying to My L.E.D. Jesus

Mystic Warned—A Literary Ballad

The Venture

Just Man

Part II

The Passing

Lena and Dev

Also By Stephen R. Galati

Looking Toward Pleiades

For you Janet, always you.

Introduction

Many people cry at funerals or fall silent when they are left alone. Some

feel the chill of fright when faced with hardship. Life at its most difficult

can be tough to understand and even tougher to accept. But acceptance

is part of healing and healing is part of understanding. This simple cycle

of resound is the wick of the emotional candle burning to completion

and the origin to the circle of reconcile.

Imagine, though, if there was some easy way around the hardships of

healing. An escape route of sorts.

For centuries people have searched for ways around life’s dark side.

Some have created mythologies to offer quantified answers and glori-

fied meaning to life’s woes. Others have tried desperately to identify

flash points in the cycle of normalcy where something unusual and

wonderful happens, like miracles. Still others have developed more inti-

mate and personal escape hatches that offer solace to those in pain and

help hasten the conclusion of healing.

Throughout the past years I have written verse and prose that, unbe-

knownst to me, centered on a common theme: the migration of pain.

Only after compiling the writings have I discovered this theme. I now

know I am one of the masses who searches for tangents to the grayness

in life and tries to find meaning when no meaning is present. Being

somewhat introverted, the best I can do is write, which, on some inner

level, helps me understand this cruel circle of reconcile. Serpari presents

my first attempt at an escape route.

In 1996 I first learned of an unusual cultural festival in the small moun-

tain village of Cocullo, Italy. Deep within the central region of Abruzzo,

the quiet village is home to a small population of shepherds, and the cen-

turies old La Festa Del Serpari or the Festival of the Snake Handlers.

The festival is known to many in the countryside of Italy and brings

forth an odd coupling of religion, myth, and tradition. Held the first

Thursday of May for the last 500 years, La Festa Del Serpari honors St.

Dominic, who was said to have chased all the venomous serpents out of

the region over one thousand years ago. Saint Dominic, a Benedictine

priest born near Foligno, is the patron saint of serpents, and is known to

miraculously cure toothaches and venomous bites.

The people of Cocullo take the festival quite seriously. The snake

men, or Serpari, go into the fields on the first day of Spring to capture

serpents awakening from their hibernation. The Serpari scour the

countryside for the Cervona variety of snake, a protected species that

can reach two meters in length. The captured serpents are preserved in

bags or jugs until the festival.

At the beginning of the festival, Saint Dominic is honored during a

Mass that is embroidered with rituals and tradition. Afterwards, the

parishioners gather blessed dirt (dust from the church walls and

floor) to spread in their fields with the notion that it will protect their

children from snakebites. The Church is home to an encased tooth of

Saint Dominic, which is kissed by some for protection. On the side of

the encasement is a small bell with an anointed cord. The devoted vis-

itors ring the bell with their bad teeth in hopes that St. Dominic will

cure them.

From Church, an ancient, wooden statue of the patron saint is

paraded throughout the village square while the Serpari wrap their

snakes upon Saint Dominic. For fear of bad luck and omens, the

snakes are strategically placed away from the statue’s eyes.

Throughout the procession, onlookers touch and kiss the statue for

protection and to rid them of suffering, while the writhing mass of

serpents overtake the statue.

The Serpari have a vital role in the festival to give each patron a spir-

itual escape from their physical ache and the fear of the unknown. For

centuries Cocullo and its visitors have tried to outwit and break free

from the nasty claws of pain in some odd sort of way.

But, then again, who says the ways we hide from life’s dark times are

not even stranger? The path to our inner feelings can be expressed hun-

dreds of ways, and, like electricity in a circuit, each person finds the

path of least resistance. Sometimes, though, the quickest passage can be

the most haunting.

This collection of poetry and prose has haunted me for years, both

on paper and in my mind. Some selections mold the shell of emotional

resolve, like in The Solemn Mississippi, while others depict a much

colder passage through a sheer human desire. The sonnet How Do Thee

Lust?, as well as When You Are Done, guide the reader from distress into

a spider’s web of pure want. The three Julia poems motivate the reader

in a similar vein.

On a personal level, poems that are much more intimate, like He Was

a Dreamer and Misunderstood, are fine examples of my emotional

breakpoints and how writing was used as my path of least resistance.

As for the prose in Serpari, the novella Lena and Dev deals with a

daughter’s grief associated with the death of her father and the insa-

tiable need to recover lost moments. Her escape route comes in the

form of something extraordinary. The Passing, on the other hand, holds

a greater charm in the main character’s migration from pain.

Now, as I sit here and close my eyes to the world around me, I hear

the voices of people I never wished to meet. Neighbors, friends,

acquaintances and strangers. These are the men and