Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Joseph Fasano

@josephfasano.bsky.social

18K followers 270 following 1.1K posts

Writer, Teacher | helping people write and be heard | Founder, Fasano Academy, educating the whole human being

Posts Media Videos Starter Packs

Pinned

Joseph Fasano @josephfasano.bsky.social · Dec 3

I will never, ever get over this.

1.3K 5.4K 41K

Joseph Fasano @josephfasano.bsky.social · 1d

How does the writer bear witness in dark times? What can words do in the face of tyranny? Where is the place for the human imagination in a time of AI? What can we do with the ancient practices of art and philosophy?

11/9, 1 PM Eastern. Let the human voice speak.

1 15

Joseph Fasano @josephfasano.bsky.social · 1d

All are welcome to join this communal discussion led by poet and professor Joseph Fasano on November 9. To register, email [email protected].

1 2 21

Joseph Fasano @josephfasano.bsky.social · 2d

❤️

Joseph Fasano @josephfasano.bsky.social · 2d

🙏🏼

Joseph Fasano @josephfasano.bsky.social · 2d

🙏🏼

1 2

Joseph Fasano @josephfasano.bsky.social · 2d

I hope this reaches you.

To a Life in Despair

Don't. Don't go to the bridge.
Don't wake in your coat in the morning light
and carry those stones into the river.
Don't find your father's pistol
in the attic, hidden in the family albums.
Don't. Don't pour the pills
into the whiskey, the walls dissolving
like your childhood. Don't, just don't choose
not to wake.

Stay. Just stay.
Tell yourself you'll do it tomorrow.
You can always walk alone into the darkness.
But not yet. Not yet. Not this soon.
I don't have a reason
to give you. All I have
is the morning, and the autumn wind,
and the child you once were
in the darkness, looking at the new moon
through the ruins, saying
save me, save me, save me,
and the moon looking back
with her vacant
face
saying I promise, I stone-
cold promise
that the face of utter
hopelessness
is the face of something just about to change.

—Joseph Fasano

7 26 100

Joseph Fasano @josephfasano.bsky.social · 4d

There should be a "not interested because this is AI" button so the algorithm can learn how much humans don't want that stuff.

2 14 95

Joseph Fasano @josephfasano.bsky.social · 4d

🙏🏼

Joseph Fasano @josephfasano.bsky.social · 4d

My Grandma Fasano has left this world. If you're Italian, you know that means there will never be that particular kind of love, that Sunday feast again.

19 2 110

Joseph Fasano @josephfasano.bsky.social · 4d

🖤

3 13 72

Joseph Fasano @josephfasano.bsky.social · 6d

translation by Gregory Hays

Joseph Fasano @josephfasano.bsky.social · 6d

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 9:

And you can also commit injustice by doing nothing.

4 27 97

Joseph Fasano @josephfasano.bsky.social · 7d

🙏🏼

Joseph Fasano @josephfasano.bsky.social · 7d

🕯️

Note Left by Humanity in the Ruins

after Heaney

Sometimes we gave water to our neighbors.
Sometimes we didn't hunt each other.
Sometimes our fathers weren't broken
and told to kiss their homes
that would be stolen.
Sometimes there was bread and wine
on the tables
and sometimes we remembered
there was no such thing as someone else's mother;
there was no such thing as someone else's child.
Sometimes there were hearts that we could hear.
Listen. We forgot
that we could listen.
Sometimes, when the fires died, it was dark enough.
We walked out and we looked up and we saw it:
the starlight, the starlight that had made us.
Sometimes no one lay in any rubble
with seven braids in her hair—
a braid for every year she'd had.
A braid for every year.

—Joseph Fasano

4 24 72

Joseph Fasano @josephfasano.bsky.social · 7d

This poem.

8 40

Reposted by Joseph Fasano

Joseph Fasano @josephfasano.bsky.social · 9d

for anyone in the darkness

8 29 110

Joseph Fasano @josephfasano.bsky.social · 8d

please read this

1 12 32

Joseph Fasano @josephfasano.bsky.social · 8d

Yes.

Joseph Fasano @josephfasano.bsky.social · 8d

From this fact we can infer who has a vested interest in what is and isn't taught.

4 19

Joseph Fasano @josephfasano.bsky.social · 8d

An educational system that does not sufficiently teach history will create students who do not sufficiently know how to recognize tyranny as it arrives.

4 19 60

Joseph Fasano @josephfasano.bsky.social · 9d

Thank you.

Joseph Fasano @josephfasano.bsky.social · 9d

My poem "October," which was published in @bostonreview.bsky.social and on @poetsorg.bsky.social, and which will be in my upcoming New and Selected Poems from BOA Editions:

October

This is the season in which the lambs begin
to die, in which the boy in his red and blue plaid

shirt gets down on his wrists and his knees to crawl
into the moorland at night and spread a cross of pumice

on their foreheads, in which he reads to them a hymn
like a freighter burning with a cargo of ripened fruit

because in the morning he will have to kill them.
Because in the morning he will wake to find his father

standing in the hall like a horse with a lamp in its mouth
and he will have to wade into a river with only that silence

in his arms, and he will harm them. Because every year
I watch him stand at the threshold of a season and begin

to call them, to hold the ruined bodies of the dead
with only a dim chord of flame between his lips

and to touch them, to touch them
and to be with them, to touch them

and to sing with them, the way a child
touches everything, with the hand of his murderer.

—Joseph Fasano

2 5 19

Joseph Fasano @josephfasano.bsky.social · 9d

7 160 740

Joseph Fasano @josephfasano.bsky.social · 9d

🙏🏼

Joseph Fasano @josephfasano.bsky.social · 9d

You're very welcome.