My Music: In Verse

By Victor Barranca

Poetry is song.
We sing it to ourselves
When the heart is full
Of joy,
Of grief,
Of sheer delight.


Poetry is its own language: the mathematics of the soul. It is song that is sung within as well as without. As we enter the world of the poet, we absorb his music through our own prism.

Using a contemporary idiom, Victor Barranca shares a collection of poems that explore the awe of love and nature as well as the fear of dangerous politics within classical and experimental forms of verse. While poignantly reflecting on the current state of the world, Barranca provides a safe place for others to do the same while navigating through a human sea to seek and understand the truth, and conquer darkness with light.

My Music is a volume of sonnets, monologues, and other writings that use a contemporary idiom to explore nature, love, and current events.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Mar 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9781480898448

Victor Barranca

Victor Barranca is a native of Brooklyn, New York, an actor who has performed roles from Shakespeare to Arthur Miller, and a lifelong student and teacher of literature, especially poetry and drama. He holds degrees from St. Francis College (Brooklyn), Brooklyn College, and Long Island University, and is a proud husband, father, and grandfather. This is his first book of poems.

Book preview

No Hero

No hero is he who sits upon his throne

And orders men into the bloody fields,

Who says he stands with many but sits alone

And uses hate and lies as swords and shields.

And what of his advisers? Who are they?

The shadows in the background of the hall,

The Richelieus and Gӧrings of today,

Who reap the profits when the bodies fall.

But people cannot live with only fear

Or feed their souls with terror and despair.

Nor gather nourishment from just a tear

Or breathe the foulness of this putrid air.

Though tyrants try to blind us with their night,

We seek the truth and conquer with the light.

When I Look Up

When I look up and see unbroken gray

And hope cannot be reached—it is too far—

And I, at sea, have lost my every way

Because the clouds have hidden every star,

When poetry no longer reigns supreme

And graphic novels are most literate

And lying hoodlums mock our naïve dream

Of having a heroic head of state,

This is the time to charter a new course

And bravely burn our bridges to the past

And don new armor, saddle a new horse,

Give courage to the people we’ve amassed.

There is no time but now and none but we

Who must now navigate the human sea.

I Wish I Could but See

Beyond This Place

I wish I could but see beyond this place,

Expand the limits of a boundless mind,

Pervade the emptiness of empty space,

And glean the world that I have yet to find.

Creation happens when the borders fade,

And boundaries dissolve into the