04 May Two poems by Peter Siedlecki
WITHOUT TRIAL
Arrested,
Apprehended,
Disappeared,
Severed from those he loves.
From life,
From his very self,
Given no opportunity
To speak
For himself
In a universeReduced to the size
Of a dark and dismal cell,
He waits.
He waits for us to remember him.
FORCED SITUATIONS BECOMING
GRACED SITUATIONS
It might be
The grip of nature
From which
There is no shelter,
Or the
Clutch of authority
From which
There is no escape.
It takes you.
It makes you bend to its will.
It tries to break you.
But your own will
Still throbs anxiously within you,
Strengthens you,
Enables you to endure,
To transcend.
About the Poet
Peter Siedlecki is Professor Emeritus of English and Poet in Residence at Daemen University. For decades, he coordinated the Readings at the RIC poetry series at Daemen. He is a former Dean of Arts and Sciences at Daemen and Fulbright Senior Lecturer in Literature at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland and at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany. He is the current director of the Catherine Burchfield Parker Artist Salon.
Siedlecki’s full-length collections of poetry include Voyeur (2006), Going With The Flow (2015), Le Trouvere Pretendu (2019), and Via Crucis: The Stations of the Cross (BlazeVOX Books, 2024), a collaborative project with the late Buffalo-based artist Catherine Burchfield Parker. These two poems appears in Via Crucis.
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Related Event
- On Wednesday, May 7 at 7:30 p.m., Peter Siedlecki will join poet Rick LaClair at the next Literary Café Series reading at the Center for Inquiry, 1310 Sweet Home Rd. in Amherst. The event free and open to the public.
The Poem of the Week feature is curated by literary legacy awardee R.D. Pohl.