Sustenance
Olives nourish Puglia,
a region kissed by the Adriatic Sea,
in Southern Italy’s Kingdom of the Sun.
New trees need 50 years to yield
harvest; 250-year-old trees
are considered young.
National monuments, trees as old
as three millennia, bear fruit
that becomes gold for growers.
En route to the Galantino groves
and factory in Bisceglie, we pass
low-lying clumps of cacti, rolled up
haystacks, stone storage rooms or trulli,
and roadside cemeteries for trees
that succumbed to a crop devastation.
I Trulli
We pass fields of red poppies
as we approach Alberobello
in Italy’s Itria Valley
where 2000 trulli
from the 18th century
draw tourists galore.
In the countryside, farmers
used them to store supplies,
for shelter and housing.
Today the unique white limestone
huts with cone-shaped roofs,
built without mortar or cement,
house hotels, shops, homes with amenities.
It’s pouring rain, we huddle under a café canopy,
relieved we had the town to ourselves for a few hours.
Amy Barone’s new poetry collection, Treesongs, was released by Broadstone Books in September, 2026. Her book, Defying Extinction, was published by Broadstone Books in 2022. New York Quarterly Books published her collection, We Became Summer, in 2018. She wrote chapbooks Kamikaze Dance (Finishing Line Press) and Views from the Driveway (Foothills Publishing). Barone’s poetry has appeared in The Café Review, New Verse News, The Ocotillo Review, and Paterson Literary Review, among other publications. She belongs to the brevitas online poetry community. From Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, she lives in New York City and Haverford, PA.
