Synkroniciti is pleased to welcome back Pennsylvania poet Craig Czury, who debuted with us last year in Dreams, with “A Seat On The Bus (Soncino-Crema Lombardia).” Craig recounts a bus ride through rural Italy during the time he taught poetry at a school for sciences. Riding alongside the students he is about to teach, he observes them closely, aware that they likely assume he is simply another passenger headed to the local hospital, which lies on the same route.
“These are my young poetry students at a school for sciences/ students at a school for disposition/ school for the what’s this got to do with me// kids who’ve been taught English since young/ and still young enough to wonder what it’s good for// they can tell you everything about Copernicus/ Galileo Tesla Isaac Newton/ but can’t tell you a damn thing about themselves”
As the bus moves through dense fog, its driver navigating by instinct, Craig reflects on the dignity of his students and on his own uncertain place in the world. A small act of kindness, being offered a seat on a crowded bus, takes on symbolic weight. Traveling without a ticket and still trying to fit in, he recognizes that he, too, has never fully found himself. The poem ultimately embraces life’s beautiful ambiguities, suggesting that all of us are travelers trying to find our way through the foggy regions of existence.
Read “A Seat On The Bus (Soncino-Crema Lombardia)” in Synkroniciti’s Dignity, Vol. 8, No. 3, available for $7 here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Craig Czury grew up in immigrant labor communities of Northeast PA where English wasn’t his first language, broken English was, in all its visceral tones and undertones, like poetry. He spent fifteen of his early years hitchhiking North America, working odd jobs and studying with some big poets.
A 2022 Fulbright Scholar to Chile, Craig lives in Dunmore, PA, where he continues his weekly Life-Writing From Cyberia online workshops. His latest book is And If You Saw Me: New and Selected Prose Poems & Poems from Moonstone Press.