The Poetry Society

Mario Petrucci

"As a teenager only peripherally engaged with poetry, I was less impressed by what our English teacher was setting in class as by his state of animation when a particular passage climbed into him.  He'd a way of hunching his shoulders, the timbre of his voice edging higher, moanier.  He seemed to drift off in a private bubble that didn't actually go anywhere, but was leaving us all far behind. 

I was too immersed in physics, chemistry and maths to float off with him; but I did notice how a particular science teacher, occasionally, would also fall into a similar internal fervour when trying to explain such mysteries as mass and movement being essentially the same thing (E = mc2).  I began to see for myself, with Blake as my guide, that there were worlds in a simple grain of sand."

Poem by a teenaged Mario Petrucci

Perception

Words and words,
And nothing more :
What are senseless stanzas
When my eyes can perceive
The intricacy of a newly-
                        bloomed flower
Or the vast expanse of a
                        celestial galaxy?
Yet the true insight
Is that which leads the way
                        to true perception.
For I am but a sentient
                        cork
On the vast sea of knowledge,
And I can see no farther
                        than my horizon ;
Until the day when a
                        crested wave,
Like the Chariot of Death,
Flings me high into the air
And enables me to see all.