Joseph Fasano
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josephfasano.bsky.social
Joseph Fasano
@josephfasano.bsky.social
18K followers 280 following 1.2K posts
Writer, Teacher | helping people write and be heard | Founder, Fasano Academy, educating the whole human being
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In case you need to hear these words...
Sudden Hymn in Winter What if, after years of trial, a love should come and lay a hand upon you and say, this late, your life is not a crime —Joseph Fasano
November 13, 2025 at 2:00 PM
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Stay 🕯️
Stay So you've woken in your hospital gown in the shadows. So you're clutching the get-wells in your desperate hands, your heart like crushed doves in your bedclothes. So the body finds its new ways to be torn. But didn't it sing once? Didn't you have a little hymn for winter? Say it. Already you know the answer: What if, just once, you truly listened— to the reaching leaves, to the stranger's breath in the next bed. You hear it? You hear what the body is saying? Remember even breathing is a song. Remember even breathing is a song. —Joseph Fasano
November 13, 2025 at 1:48 PM
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One of the cruelest things about mental illness is that it can isolate very loving, empathetic people from the most intimate relationships. I wrote this poem when I was in a psych ward, thinking about others—known and unknown—who have carried life this way. 🖤
Written on Van Gogh's Wall I was here. I will walk out through the deep leaves of October and kneel there with the cold foal of my shadow and try to send it off into the river. I will leave my grief like long and polished oars. Listen. I did feel joy. Then razed it. And you, my friend, you who find these small words to erase them, you who wear the gold ring of a new life, pause here and look up through casement, the barest branches singing into winter. If I could choose between a great work and a great love I would choose what is hardest for my impossible heart. I know. I know what I will say at the terrible end: The sadness, the hell will last forever. This is hell, this is what hell is: to be born so wild for love with a beast in you that keeps it from your door. —Joseph Fasano
November 12, 2025 at 9:14 PM
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I hope this reaches you, if you need it. 🕯️
Judas Thirty years I've wandered lost in madness. Now I stand alone beneath these branches and knot the rope and loosen it and knot again. I tell you you could forgive yourself and start again. You could open. You could find, just once, the way. You can't betray your one true life forever. I know. I know that you are broken. But do not be like me, my little children, and stand there at the end, in all your wreckage, and see that what you've done is what they'll tell of, that the fear to live your one life was your one life, and your greatest, your greatest, most mistaken day was your vastest chance, your vastest chance to waken. Fall out of love with your pain. —Joseph Fasano
November 12, 2025 at 4:19 PM
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Today I'm thinking of all veterans, all who carry seen and unseen scars. I can still hear the voice of my grandfather, Nicholas Fasano, who fought against tyranny at the Battle of the Bulge. And I can hear what he said, silently, with his acts. With his hands. With his life.
November 11, 2025 at 3:47 PM
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🖤
November 9, 2025 at 1:45 PM
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for you, friends 🤍
The Song of Songs This is how it is: we live again. We rise up from the death-bed in our wreckage and we walk again and we open every window, and we live again, though living is the cost.   Yes, my friends, I have a thing to tell you:   My story is your story, on this wild earth:   I loved once, I was broken, and I rose again—   and although I closed my arms around my body, although I said that darkened harp was ruined, the nights have filled my life with brutal music that has taught me that we're only here to listen, to hold each other awhile and to listen,   and to carry each other with the song of songs inside us that is wiser, and is greater than our changes, and that sings the way most wholly when we're lost. —Joseph Fasano
November 5, 2025 at 10:30 PM
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🖤🖤🖤
In the Dark I Heard The Lost Children Saying, Tell us, what do the living do? Do you dance? Do you make bread with each other? Do you walk in the parks in autumn, smelling the late summer flowers? Is it true that some things get to grow old? What is the world doing now? Are you fighting with sticks and stones? Do you remember us? Do you lie down under the stars and listen to the birds passing overhead, and do you get to feel the little wings of your own wild heart be opened? You have somewhere to go then, don't you? Go. Don't let us keep you. We are ash. We are stone. We are schoolrooms. We are hiding in our favorite little places, waiting for you to tap us on the shoulders, to tell us it was just a joke, come home now, and the guns and boots are just a game we're playing, the bread and milk are waiting on the table, and the moon is new, and the gardens are in blossom. This sentence is the length of one of our shoes.
November 5, 2025 at 7:36 PM
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Sunday! Email for more info: joseph.fasano@gmail.com.
November 5, 2025 at 7:01 PM
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for all the healers
November 4, 2025 at 7:40 PM
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I've found the best way to work through dark times is to gather together as a community and help each other create. On November 9, at 1 PM Eastern, I'll be hosting a webinar/workshop to do exactly that. To get the link, just email me at joseph.fasano@gmail.com. 🕯️
October 30, 2025 at 3:31 PM
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This is for everyone who needs it. 🖤
How to Survive Love the small things of the earth. 
The dust. The dark rain in the lemon trees.
The sound of moonflowers opening 
at evening. Love them 
even when the sky is burning, 
even when a mother crouches with her child
in a dark room, wetting his lips 
with a small glass of water. Love them 
quietly, quietly but ferociously, 
their hearts in them like flocks 
the wind has furled. 

And then, in the spring, if the world 
has survived, walk out 
with your gift that you have practiced, 
your fresh gift that has ripened in secret;
lie down in the long, soft grass of summer
and wait for love, wait for it 
to find you— 
and when it lays its hand at last 
upon your shoulder, open 
to all that is about to happen; 
rise up and walk off into the lemon trees 
and live awhile, live awhile 
with someone—their eyes, their scent, their curls—
 and when love departs, when love 
is done and fallen, stand there 
in the coming winds of autumn 
and turn back to the small things 
that have been with you— 
buttons, apples, chapters— 
and then, because you've practiced this
forever, because you are ready now 
for the hardest task of all of them, 

lay your hand on the changed face in the mirror
and look at it— 
its wounds, its crimes, its changes— 
and tell yourself what you see
deserves your mercy—that face, that name, that stranger—
and place your palms on that one life in the mirror
and open to the whole of it, the whole of it, 
and love it like the last chance of the world. —Joseph Fasano
October 30, 2025 at 2:35 AM
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It was wonderful to teach a poetry workshop at Harvard this weekend. Thanks to the Harvard Undergraduate Creative Writing Collective for inviting me. When I hear all these new voices, I know the future of literature is bright.
October 28, 2025 at 1:55 AM
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🕯️
October 26, 2025 at 3:16 PM
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For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper
For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper Now I let it fall back in the grasses. I hear you. I know this life is hard now. I know your days are precious on this earth. But what are you trying to be free of? The living? The miraculous task of it? Love is for the ones who love the work. —Joseph Fasano
October 25, 2025 at 8:05 PM
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I'm giving a *free* poetry workshop today (October 25) at the Boston Book Festival. All are welcome, no matter your level of experience in the world of words. Come and create.🕯️
October 25, 2025 at 2:06 PM
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Whenever I stop by a city to give a reading, I duck into the local bookstores & leave little notes in some of my books for poetry readers. Here we are in Cambridge. 🕯️
October 24, 2025 at 10:36 PM
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For all who didn't make it through the darkness, and for all who are still in it somewhere. 🖤
October 24, 2025 at 6:42 PM
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This poem appeared in the poem-a-day program from The Academy of American Poets and was later collected in The Crossing (2018). I hope it finds its way to you.
October 22, 2025 at 6:03 PM
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These words were too late for a dear friend who left too soon, but I offer them in the hope that they're not too late for someone. Break the stigma. Talk about the pain. Stay.
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
October 22, 2025 at 2:24 PM
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I'll be giving two events in Boston/Cambridge this weekend, one for the public and one for Harvard undergrads. Details for the public event can be found at the Boston Book Festival website (link below). Come say hi!
October 21, 2025 at 8:03 PM
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I'm giving away a signed copy of The Swallows of Lunetto, my novel about fascism in Italy, because I think we need to understand how the madness can happen anywhere.

Just leave a like/comment so I see you, and I'll drop your name in the hat. I hope this book holds its little 🕯️.
October 20, 2025 at 10:24 PM
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Autumn Hymn
Autumn Hymn after Rilke and Trakl It is time now. Summer was so formless. It is time to lie down now in the shadowy house, the dark oars of an absence on your shoulders. Let be, let dark, let wind in; let your grief be a child in black wool, carrying a cello through the ruins; let the great books tumble open now with ease. Open. Give in and open. Yes, it is over, something's over. Yes, the new life feels like death again. But tonight there is only this crumbling, this delicate intricate crumbling, and a wind that sings I promise, love, I promise that Death is so immaculately gorgeous that dressed in leaves even God falls to his knees. —Joseph Fasano
October 20, 2025 at 7:09 PM
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🖤
October 20, 2025 at 1:31 AM
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Just to be absolutely clear...
For Those Who Try to Follow Both Trump and Christ You cannot do both. You cannot believe in malice and in mercy, in a man who needs to give the world his own pain and in one who knew you'd try to call that God. Look. Look at what can use you. You have to choose, in this one life: a brief, mad king who grabs a crown of power or a man who stooped to every wound that's human, who died for crying love, just love each other, and who wears a crown forever because it was the thing he did not want. —Joseph Fasano
October 19, 2025 at 9:51 PM