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Home Town

Home Town

Felix Stefanile

The drunks sang hero to the moon, that like
a bill-collector, stalled along the streets,
wishing my old man home. A concrete lake,
the warehouse glittered under the wind-swayed lights,
where the policeman stepped, head bowed, and whistling,
amazing the silence with his loneliness.
The dawn came grayly, with the gulls,
the slow ruckus of the milk-truck, and my mother
padding, a sheeted figure, to the door,
opening to a cold, tin-foil horizon.
The bottles she gathered rang like a white money
left by a clumsy fairy: in my dream
the church-clock clanged with a country tongue,
the sparrows clicked like pennies on the pavement,
saying the world was round again, like her.

Prairie Schooner, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Spring 1957), p. 56

View Author Bio
Felix Stefanile

Felix Stefanile (1920-2009) was born in Long Island, New York. A World War II veteran, he worked at various jobs until 1950, when he began his 11-year stint in the New York Department of Labor. In 1954 he and his wife, Selma, started the poetry magazine Sparrow, which was one of the oldest poetry journals in the United States until they stopped publication in 2000. Some of his major collections are A Fig Tree in America and East River Nocturne.

Author /// Comment

Stefanile considered home both America and Italy and was fiercely proud of both backgrounds. In a 1992 interview, he stated that, “my fondest memory of my father, whom I lost when I was eight, is sitting me on his knee and his telling me of the beauties of the country he came from.” He named his poetry magazine Sparrow because “a sparrow is the opposite of the bird of paradise. A sparrow does not run away in the winter, and a sparrow can sing among the stones, it doesn’t need leaves to sing.”

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