Gioconda, Mona Lisa Poem by Joseph S. Josephides

Gioconda, why do you smile confusing the folks and experts?
Do you stare at me, for I insist that Sundays follow Mondays?
For I consider the cloud as smoke though it rains a whole life?

Is it because I’m a tree hiding my roots away for economy?
Cause I work for others who breathe my oxygen at no cost?

Do you smile for we can’t separate the white from the blank,
flour from heroine, cinder of fireplace from the ashes of war?
Or because a star is dead and shines only from its past?
You smile seeing the rainbow that I can’t from where I stand?
Or because the thorns don’t let me behead the rose’s head?
Is it for the silkworm that saves no silk to dress up itself?

The circle bites its edge, the snake its tail. So do you smile
for Bob Straud, sent for life imprisonment at the Island of Birds,
curing ill birds and giving lectures to the doctors of the USA?

Mona, is it for the rivers flowing sweet waters into salted ones?
Or for the flying fishes of Kitium are neither fishes nor birds?
Or for a bank, prompt to lend an umbrella when rain stops?
Or for I think that you think what I think? Why you still smile?
Do I talk what others have already talked. Is it? Or because
I don’t listen up what the others have heard? I think I know

you smile because Aphrodite puts on her dress of nudity
and it takes a century for those ten minutes waiting the date
when Einstein was awaiting his girlfriend with a bouquet.
Yes that minute of Mozart’s birth is equal to centuries
when stretched his umbilical strap to make a violin string.



© JosephJosephides