LATIN
BANDUSIAN FOUNTAIN
SNOWS MELTED
THE SHORE
TO HIS SOUL
I LOVE AND HATE
CINNA
MY LITTLE GIRL
ON A GIFT OF EGGS AND PLUMS
ITALIAN
FIREFLY
IN THE GREENHOUSE
THE MUSES’ INFANT
THE EEL
YOUR FLIGHT
IN THE PARK AT CASERTA
LAKE ANNECY
SYRIA
THE TEMPEST
TO LIUBA, LEAVING
TO MY MOTHER
YOU KNOW IT
YOUR VOICE
DONNA GENOVESE
TABULA RASA
UNREADY
BIRTH
BROOM
CHILDREN
CLEANLINESS
CRUMB
VIOLENCE
LIVING
THE PERSIMMON TREE
SEAGULLS
THE LOOK
YOU AND I
ANNIVERSARY OF THE DEAD
COALS
I SPY
LINGUA
NUMBERS
SUPERTSITIONS
THE NAIL
MORNING IS WHERE YOU ARE
DEOLA
I WILL PASS BY PIAZZA DI SPAGNA
THE CATS WILL KNOW
IN THE MORNING YOU ALWAYS COME BACK
MATIN
THE SLEEPING FRIEND
YOU HAVE A BLOOD, A BREATH
MYTH
AGONY
NOCTURNE
YOU DO NOT KNOW THE HILLS
RED EARTH BLACK EARTH
SUMMER
THE NIGHT YOU SLEPT
YOU ARE LIKE A LAND
YOU HAVE A FACE CARVED FROM STONE
YOU ALWAYS COME FROM THE SEA
LAST BLUES, TO BE READ SOME DAY
DEATH WILL COME AND HAVE YOUR EYES
YOU, WIND OF MARCH
AUTUMN SONG
JOURNEY
TALK TO ME
THE BEAUTIFUL THINGS
EXILES
DEAR WATER
THE FIRST STRAWBERRIES
THREE APPARITIONS AT WASSEN
BEYOND SAVOGNA, TOWARDS THE ISONZO RIVER
THE PROMISED LAND
CHRISTMAS EVE
I DON’T TELL YOU DAD
THREE DIVIDED BY TWO
1920
I SAW
NURSING HOME, PODSABOTIN
CARRY ON WITH GOODBYES
THE YEARS OF LEAD
WHEN THEY TOLD YOU
ALESSIO LOVES ROSES
WITHOUT WINE
DARKNESS COMES EARLY
PREVAL
I DON’T KNOW HOW TO SAY GOODBYE
CAVE DEL PREDIL
THE MEASURE
I KNOW HOW BUTTERFLIES DIE
TRENITALIA
ASK YOURSELF WHY
I HAVE BEEN A FATHER TO MY FATHER
NO MAN’S LAND
A SUDDEN LONELINESS
FOR STEFANIA, AT LAST
“these are the lines I was looking for for Rose”
HEREDITY
ITALY
THE NINTH ANNIVERSARY
CYPRESSES
I NEVER WANTED TO TALK ABOUT MY SISTER
ON THE DAY OF THE FORTY-NINTH BIRTHDAY
SALVAGED SOULS
I LIVE HERE PART 2
WHAT CAN I TEACH MY CHILDREN
HALF EMPTY, HALF FULL
I THINK OF YOU
OUR LADY OF DISORDER
THE EARTHQUAKE OF ‘76
PRUNING
THE FLOOD OF NOVEMBER 5TH
SPANISH
REVELATION OF LIFE
ON SELF-KNOWLEDGE
ON LAND
MESSAGES FOR THE WOMAN OF WINTERS
IMAGES
BLACK SWALLOWS
ANNUNCIATION
MARGARITA
NATIVITY
WOMAN
A DREAM
LOVERS, METAPHOR FOR IRONWORKS
REQUIEM FOR THE CHERRY TREES
NIGHT ILLUSION
ATLANTIS SLEEPING
THE MOSAICS OF ALEXANDRIA
TO KARMEN BLASQUEZ
TO MY MOTHER
NIGHT
BETWEEN LIFE AND DEATH
NO ONE IS A PROPHET IN HIS OWN MIRROR
NOTSENTIMENTAL EDUCATION
LOVERS’ GARDEN
VIOLIN
BONE
CRUSOE’S MESSAGE TO THE SHIPWRECKED
AT THE END
BLIND WATER
HANDS PAINTING IN A CAVE
A MATURE WOMAN MAKES AN APPOINTMENT
AGELESS
ORACLE
DAWN
THE SOUTH, THE DREAM
AMBIGUITY
DANGERS II
FIRST SONG OF THE SEA
TRUE
IN SYMPATHY
METAMORPHOSIS II
SPELLING THE WATER
THERE ARE MEN WHO WILL NEVER LEAVE
THE GIRL OF DARKNESS
LAST SPRING
THE INNER ORBIT
BEYOND THE GUITAR
MEMORIES OF THE FUTURE
MY VOICE STRIPPED BARE
SOIF
WHEN THE WORD IS THE SEED
RAINDROP
I DON’T WANT HIM HERE
SWEET SNOW IS FALLING
DECISION
THEY SAY
WRITTEN IN THE SIDE OF A TREE
YOUR NAME
ATTIC
BESTIARY
CHOIR OF THE PROVNCES
BRIDGE
THE GRANDFATHER
CLOSING MY EYES
RECOLLECTION OF AN OBLIVION
HYPOCRISY
DE VIA BEATA
ELEGY AND REMEMBRANCE OF A FRENCH SONG
LOVE MORE POWERFUL THAN LIFE
CATALAN
APOCALYPSE
FIRST LETTER WRITTEN IN THE EVENING
ETERNITY
FAN
I WILL LIVE
THE DARK HOUR
THE END
LATIN
BANDUSIAN FOUNTAIN
Bandusian fountain, your crystal-and purer
water, worthy of sweet wine and flowers
tomorrow will drink deeper dye:
a young kid, forehead horn-swollen, veins
vain-destined for heat of love and tussle,
will open to warm your cool heart
untouched by cruel Dog-day heat. Gratefully
kneel wandering flocks, plough-wearied oxen
slaking their thirst, by that ilex and echoing
cavern hollowed by your chattering clatter
over the rocks and into the regular
fame of my metre.
Horace
SNOWS MELTED
Snows melted, grass grows in the meadows,
leaves in trees,
earth endures change, shrinking rivers run,
bound by their banks,
Grace with her nymphs and twin sisters strip and dance,
leading the choir.
But do not hope: the year and day-diminishing hour
warn us off immortality.
Frost succumbs to the west wind; summer overpowers spring,
will bend in turn
to profuse, seed-shedding autumn, then winter pinches
skin and shortened day.
Celestial moons are quick to make themselves whole:
we below
with wealthy Tullus and Ancus and ancestral Aeneas
wither to dust and shade.
Who knows if the gods will add as few as one
to the sum of todays?
Give to your own sweet self, and avoid the profligate
hands of your heir.
Once you are gone and Minos has given his judgement,
neither your family,
Torquatus, nor golden tongue, nor selfless deeds
can summon you back:
how can they when great Diana's chaste Hippolytus
stays pinioned in dark,
and Theseus' passion foundered on his Pirithous'
Lethean bonds?
Horace
THE SHORE
This sea, this shore, dear to me beyond life.
Sweet it is to see again where, safe
from the turbid city, I churned the waves,
surprising nymphs and minnow. The lovers’
cove I recognise, the fountain’s source, the calm
where weeds repose. My day has come
and gone, but will remain forever in this flux.
No ebb can rob what generous noon has given us.
Petronius
TO HIS SOUL
My body’s constant guest
and friend, fleeting little soul,
into what region - pale, cold
naked, little soul - must you go, bereft
of the comfort of a jest?
Hadrian
I LOVE AND HATE
I love and hate. Don't ask me to explain:
there is no explanation but the pain.
Catullus
CINNA
Cinna, they say you write slight lines to slander me.
Are binned, unread verses really poetry?
Martial
MY LITTLE GIRL
To you my parents, Fronto and Flacilla,
I commend with a kiss my darling and delight,
my little girl Erotion. Shelter her
from dread of shadows or the horrid jaws
of Tartarus. She would have seen just six
cold winters had she lived as many days.
Let her play, protected by such elders
and lisp my name perhaps, in playful chatter.
Heap no hard turf on her gentle bones,
nor, earth, lie heavy; she was not thus on you.
Martial
ON A GIFT OF EGGS AND PLUMS
You feed me first with delicacies
then with fruit. Here eggs are found,
on this side plums. White gifts and dark
in harmony abound.
Let me stomach be at peace
with such varied food.
Eggs: you ordered two
for my evening meal. To tell
the truth, I helped myself
to four. I pray my mind
is as compliant all my days
as is my grateful belly now.
Venantius Fortunatus
***********************************
ITALIAN
FIREFLY
It seems impossible to me,
my divine, my everything,
that there remains of you less
than the greenish-red fire
on a firefly out of season.
The truth is but the same
The incorporeal
cannot equal your sky
- only the shells which imprint the cosmos
in their aberration say something
which touches on you.
Montale
IN THE GREENHOUSE
Static, a line of old women filling
the greenhouse with lemon trees,
in a rosary of faltering drops
the hay-scythe shone.
On the quinces blazed
a cochineal. I heard beneath
the curry-comb the pony’s breath.
Then the dream’s triumph:
delighted and faint, I was drenched
with you, your form was in me
a secret breath; your face
merged in mine, and God’s
dark thought descended on rare
beings among celestial sounds,
childish tambours and aerial
globes that lightning-flashed
on me, on you, on the lemons …
Montale
THE MUSES’ INFANT
Fill your suitcase,
little one, with your carminas
sacred or profane;
and throw it into a current
that will carry it far away and leave it
prisoner, lid half-open,
of the loose stones. Perhaps someone
will save several pages of it, doubtless
the worst, what matter? The palace,
the taste of the gods has to differ
from ours, with nothing to say which would be the better.
What matters is that from this bubbling up
should come afloat something which says to us
you did not know me, I did not know you: yet
we had in for our share the divine madness
of being here and not there; living or what passes
for the like, my little one. Now leave
and do not give back your case too tightly sealed.
Montale
THE EEL
The eel: siren
of the cold seas, leaving the Baltic
to rejoin our seas,
our estuaries, the rivers
which she climbs again in depth, under the opposing swell,
arm in arm then
stream to stream, always more thinly,
always more on the inside, always more to the heart
of the rock, edging one’s way
into the rivulets of silt until the day
when a ray bursting out of the chestnut trees
switches on its light in the ponds of dead water,
in the ditches which descend
from the sides of the Appenines towards the Romagna;
the eel, torch, whip,
arrow of Love on the earth
which only our ravines or the dried-up streams
of the Pyrenees lead back
to the paradise of fecundity;
green soul which seeks out life
there where there is only the bite
of the dog days’ scorching heat and the desolation;
a spark saying
everything begins when everything seems
to fossilise, suckers buried;
iridescent glimmer, twin
of that which encases your eyelashes
and which you make shine intact among the threads
of man submerged in your mud: can you
doubt that she is your sister?
Montale
YOUR FLIGHT
If you appeared at the fire (your amulets
hanging on your wick-like hair
spangling you)
two lights would fight over you
in the mountain stream which buries itself
under the arch of the pine trees.
Your dress in tatters, the trampled
shrubs remake lightning flashes
and, bloated, the fishpond of human tadpoles
opens itself to the furrows of the night.
Oh don’t disturb the foul
bank, leave all around
the bundle of burning sticks, the smoke acrid
on the survivors!
If you split the fire (your fair hair
ashen on the wrinkle which, tender,
has abandoned the sky),
how will the silken hand,
the gemmed, be able to find again among the dead
its faithful one?
Montale
IN THE PARK AT CASERTA
Where the cruel swan twists to preen himself, on the surface of the pond,
among the leafage a sphere wakens, ten spheres,
a torch at the bottom of the water, ten torches,
tentatively a sun balances itself in the morning air
on the green domes, on the lopsided globes of the monkey puzzles
unpicking like lianas arms of stone
grips without respite the passing
and from the remotest point
extracts from it roots and stamen.
The knuckles of the mothers clench,
search the emptiness.
Montale
LAKE ANNECY
I don't know why my memory of you
is tied to Lake Annecy
which I visited some years before your death.
But I didn't think of you then,
I was young and thought myself master of my own destiny.
I don't know how it's possible for a memory
so deeply buried in the sand to gush forth again;
you have certainly embedded yourself in me
without my realising.
Now you rise again alive but not quite here;
I could have looked for your boarding-school then
and seen the children coming out in file
to find one of those thoughts you had
when you were still alive.
I never thought of it. And now that there's no point
a picture of the lake is all I need.
Montale
SYRIA
The elders used to say that poetry
is the stairway to God.
Maybe it isn't so when you read me.
But I knew it the day
I rediscovered that voice for you,
dissolved in a herd of clouds and goats
hurtling down an embankment to graze,
foaming at sloes and rushes, and the lean faces
of the moon and sun as they merged.
The car had broken down
and an arrow of blood on a rock was pointing
the way to Aleppo.
Montale
THE TEMPEST
The storm that pours down on the hard leaves
of the magnolia the lengthy March thunders
and its hail
(the sounds of crystal in your night-time nest
surprise you,
gold spread to nothing on mahogany,
on the worn spines of bound books,
burns again,
a grain of sugar in the shell
of your eyelids)
the lightning that whitens
trees and walls catching them in that instant eternity
marble, manna and destruction
you carry it carved inside you like a sentence
that binds us more than love,
strange sister
and then the rending crash, the sistrum, the shaking
of the tambourines above the furtive ditch,
the shifting stamp of the fandango, and above,
some gesture which gropes and flounders -
as when you turned and with your hand set free
your forehead from its cloud of hair
then said farewell - as you embraced the dark.
Montale
TO LIUBA, LEAVING
It is no longer the cricket but the family cat
who counsels you,
splendid lare of your scattered family.
The house you carry with you
wrapped up - cage or hat-box? -
dominates the blind times like a flood;
a light Ark - sufficient for your redemption.
Montale
TO MY MOTHER
Now that the chorus
of the rock partridges
caress your eternal sleep,
happy flock fleeing in disorder towards
the grape-harvested hills of the Mesco;
now that yet again
the struggle of the living rages,
if you surrender like a shadow
your skin (and it's not a shadow, dearest,
it's not what you believe)
who will protect you?
The emptied road is not a way,
only two hands, a face,
those hands, that face, the gesture of a life
which is no other but itself,
that alone will place you in the Elysium
peopled with souls and voices
in which you live;
and the question which you left, it too
is a gesture of yours in the shadow of the crosses.
Montale
YOU KNOW IT
You know it; I must lose you again and I can't.
Tight as gun-sight, the least movement
throws me off; every cry; and even the salty
breath that flows over the piers and darkens
spring at Sottoripa.
Landscape of girders and masts,
forest in evening's dust,
an unending hums comes through an opening,
scrapes like nails on glass. I look
for the lost sign, the only pledge I had in grace
from you.
And hell is certain.
Montale
YOUR VOICE
The soul that lavishes forlane and rigadoon
on each new season of the route,
feeds itself on a secret passion,
finds it again at every corner more intense.
Your voice is that hovering soul.
On wires, on wings, on the wind,
by chance,
at the whim of the muse
or of some instrument,
returns joyful or sad.
I speak of something else
to others who ignore you;
and its pattern is there, insisting doh ray lah soh soh...
Montale
DONNA GENOVESE
You came with a strand of seaweed in
your hair and in your bronzed body
a breath of wind that has travelled far
and arrives heavy with ardour:
O the divine simplicity
Of your slender forms
not love not a pang, a phantom,
a shadow of the need which wanders
serene and inescapable through the soul
and melts it in joy, calm in its spell
so the sirocco can bear it away
through the infinite.
How small and light the world is in your hands!
Dino Campana
TABULA RASA
All right, love. Let’s erase
from the text water-pearls
upon petals,
the broad fringes,
the foam-bubbles.
The gladly needful things.
Let’s take away also
water, air, bread.
Down to the bone do we throw
out of life
the bone, the soul,
to believe in your tabula
which will never have
the icon, the idol, the dear compass-point?
Bartolo Cattafi
UNREADY
Already in the dark damp windows
As in the grottoes the anaemic hyacinths
Appear with a gentle stupor
But, spring, we are not ready
We are still like the tree
Weighed down by its dead leaves
Love of summer past
Lalia Romano
BIRTH
Go out from darkness and dolour
towards life
and your distant death
towards your unasked-for sadness
and suffering and inevitable pain
but also joy and fullness
in the ripening of fruit
suspended on the branch
in the perfect sphere
life the glutton
sinking its teeth in flesh.
Donatella Bisutti
BROOM
From the darkness of earth
I draw anguish and anxiety.
I flower
like the broom.
Donatella Bisutti
CHILDREN
There are children born
to a man and woman who loved
each other so much;
and you imagine these children
with a seal impressed on their flesh
signifying a granted wish,
born of superabundance – instead
they are the most alone, the least
wanted –
a mere token – at times a regret:
their birth subtracts
from a love so exclusive it admits
no strangers.
Donatella Bisutti
CLEANLINESS
To kill from afar
without touching.
To avoid contagion.
Wash your hands
dirtied with blood.
Wash your hands
in blood.
~
The angels
with robes of barbed wire.
The angels of torn tongues.
The angels without a guide.
~
From bone we make swords.
Arms.
From a skull a round shield.
Donatella Bisutti
CRUMB
A crumb contains the bread,
a drop
the water in the cup.
Not
the other way round.
Donatella Bisutti
VIOLENCE
As well as the horror
the rose.
The bloody rose.
Donatella Bisutti
LIVING
An instant visible:
against the pane,
a breath’s outline.
Donatella Bisutti
THE PERSIMMON TREE
First Traveller
The persimmon tree grows
against the sky of the last station
on the branches' bareness,
the low trajectory of winter suns.
For them the tree has renounced
the sumptuous gloss of the leaves.
It gathers itself in the honey of thought.
Second Traveller
Tree of a spoiled Eden
in the dream it has managed
to return winter to summer.
Nothing shows more clearly
that life isn't born of necessity
but subversion
and beauty is the fruit of the imagination.
Donatella Bisutti
SEAGULLS
In the evening, gulls land by the bay,
he and she, with the tolerance
of a long-married couple
in the uncertain light when earth
retreats from the sea’s dark
wrinkled like a turtle’s head.
Out of their element like ducks on land
they attend each other, swaying;
they peck as if in a yard.
Finally tamed, you could say,
sated, restored.
Yet they remain a hairsbreadth
from the water, faithful
to their nature and the wingbeat
between land and sea.
Donatella Bisutti
THE LOOK
The cat
approaches from the bottom of the garden
lightly licks the bowl
then sits immobile
looking straight ahead, fixed,
its pupils in mine
not thanking or asking
just looking;
and I whole in its pupils
without judgement or statement
entirely within.
Donatella Bisutti
YOU AND I
It isn’t you I kill:
I kill the monster inside you.
It isn’t you I kill:
I kill the monster inside me.
Donatella Bisutti
ANNIVERSARY OF THE DEAD
You who with harsh arms
carried me away
and terrified me with ghost stories,
how shy you appear now from the wall
for fear of being turned out.
It’s snowing
and your feet leave prints
in a vague mist.
Inconsolable, you offer me your hand,
the hand of hope as well as of the dead.
So mother and child walk the length of the avenues,
you who dominated, uncertain;
finally a smile on the scythe of the closed lips.
But it snows and day
turns toward the end – not even now
does it bring forgiveness or oblivion.
Donatella Bisutti
COALS
The coals burn low
through the vast spates of anguish
of autumn or winter
when vague wings whistling
pass the fissures of windows
and pangs sharpen
in the memory of love
punctured by silence,
and from their jail flee
in pursuit of other people,
other figures of coal.
Michele Sovente
I SPY
I spy on you
With the longing eyes
of a lizard
in the damp
where I lose myself.
Michele Sovente
LINGUA
Language imprinted in the void
leaves the shadows loves
devouring-ephemeral strips
falling on the knots of the body;
from the point of history evidence
loses itself among the abraded names
and the exhausted desires
beg for rest. Empty gleams
language in the frost, the liquid plains
pursue her, presently
the forked tongue cuts and removes
in the infinite imprinted void.
Michele Sovente
NUMBERS
Remove and replace
a house with a garden
a backdrop with a mirror
all the world’s gold with love.
All that sprouts outside,
infinite, is but a handful
of stings to prick your skin,
a cable of such length
no one knows where it ends.
And the great count: remove
a line of zeros, reach
another history, no longer hooped
with numbers: no more fear.
Michele Sovente
SUPERTSITIONS
At winter twilight one hears
the wind’s flight as it thrashes
and blows about among the wood shavings
then moves off
into the far, far distance
with the tiniest particles
of every wind
it takes off god knows where
the wan soul, the soul
in a flux of spectral presences
while nature
shows a different face
within a muddled heap.
Michele Sovente
THE NAIL
The nail struck, fastened to the wall,
the mortar shivers, a flake of it breaking away,
eyes and hands working together
enough the smallest error
to feel the hammer’s harm.
Michele Sovente
MORNING IS WHERE YOU ARE
(Dove sei tu, luce, e il mattino)
You were life and matter.
We breathed in you
under the sky that is still in us.
No punishment, no fever then,
nor this heavy shadow of day
crowded and different. O light,
distant clarity, laboured
breath, turn your eyes,
motionless and clear, on us.
Dark is the morning that passes
without the light of your eyes.
Cesare Pavese
DEOLA
(Ritorno di Deola)
We will return to the street to stare at passersby
and we too will be passing. We will study
how to get up in the morning, putting off the disgust
of night, and leave with the passage of another time.
We will bend our head to the work of the past.
We'll come back there, against the glass, to smoke
groggily. But the eyes will be the same,
the gestures too, and the face. That vain secret
that lingers in the body and misleads us
will die slowly in the rhythm of blood
where everything is lost.
We'll leave one morning,
we will no longer have a home, will go out on the street;
night-time disgust will have left us;
we will tremble to be alone. But we want to be alone.
We will fix the passers-by with the dead smile
of one who is defeated, but does not hate or shout
since he knows that since ancient times luck
- everything that has already been or will be - is inside the blood,
in the whisper of the blood. We will bend our forehead
alone, in the middle of the road, listening to an echo
inside the blood. And this echo will no longer vibrate.
We will look up, our gaze fixed on the street.
Cesare Pavese
I WILL PASS BY PIAZZA DI SPAGNA
(Passerò per Piazza di Spagna)
It will be a clear sky.
The streets will open
on the hill of pines and stone.
The tumult of the streets
will not change that steady air.
The flowers spraying
their colours by the fountains
will look like amused
women. The stairs,
the swallows, the terraces
will sing in the sun.
That road will open,
the stones will sing,
the heart will beat, spurting
like water in the fountains -
this will be the voice
that will climb your stairs.
The windows will know
the smell of stone and air
in early morning. A door will open.
The tumult of the streets
will be the tumult of the heart
in the lost light.
So will you be - firm and clear.
Cesare Pavese
THE CATS WILL KNOW
Rain will fall again
on your paved sweets,
a light rain
like a breath or a step.
Still the breeze and the dawn
will lightly bloom
as under your step,
when you come back.
Between flowers and windowsills
the cats will know it
There will be other days, other voices.
You will smile alone.
The cats will know it.
You will hear ancient words,
tired and vain words
like the stored-away costumes
of yesterday's feasts.
The cats will know it,
face of spring;
and light rain,
hyacinth-coloured dawn,
that tear the heart apart
which no longer hopes for you,
I am the sad smile
you smile alone.
There will be other days,
other voices and awakenings.
We will blow about in the dawn,
face of spring.
Cesare Pavese
IN THE MORNING YOU ALWAYS COME BACK
The glimmer of dawn
breathes with your mouth
at the end of the empty streets.
Grey light in your eyes,
sweet drops of dawn
on the dark hills.
Like the dawn wind
your step and your breath
flood the houses.
The city shines,
a smell of air from the stones
you are life, the wakening.
Lost star
in the light of dawn,
creaking of the breeze,
warmth, breath
the night is over.
You are the light and the morning.
Cesare Pavese
MATIN
(Mattino)
The half-open window contains a face
above the sea field. The vague hair
accompanies the tender rhythm of the sea.
There are no memories on this face,
only a fleeting shadow, like a cloud.
The shade is moist and sweet as sand
of an intact hollow at twilight.
There are no memories. Just a whisper
which is the voice of the sea remembered.
In the twilight the soft water of dawn
that is imbued with light, lightens the face.
Every day is a timeless miracle,
under the sun: light impregnates it like a sauce,
like a taste of living marine fruit.
There is no memory on this face.
There is no word that contains it
or shares with things past. Yesterday
it vanished from the short window, as
it will vanish in a moment, without sadness
or human words, on the field of the sea.
Cesare Pavese
THE SLEEPING FRIEND
(L'amico che dorme)
What will we say tonight to the sleeping friend?
The tentative word rises to our lips
from the most atrocious punishment. We will look at the friend,
his useless lips that say nothing,
we will talk in low voices.
Night will have the face
of an ancient pain that emerges every evening,
impassive and alive. The remote silence
will suffer like a soul, dumb, in the dark.
We'll talk at night when it's quiet.
We will hear the moments dripping in the dark
beyond things, in the anxiety of dawn,
that will come suddenly affecting things
against the dead silence. The useless light
will reveal the absorbed face of the day. Moments
hold their peace. And things will talk softly.
Cesare Pavese
YOU HAVE A BLOOD, A BREATH
(Hai un sangue, un respiro)
You have a blood, a breath
You have a blood, a breath.
You are made of flesh
of looks, hair,
you too. Earth and plants,
March sky, light,
they vibrate and resemble you;
your rice and your step
like startled waters;
your wrinkle between the eyes
like clouds collected;
your tender body
a plate in the sun.
You have a blood, a breath.
You live on this earth.
You know the flavors
the seasons the awakenings,
you’ve played in the sun,
you’ve talked to us.
Clear water, shoot,
spring, earth,
budding silence,
you played, little girl
under a different sky,
its silence in your eyes,
a cloud that gushes out
as from the bottom of a pool.
Now laugh and jerk
above this silence.
Sweet fruit that lives
under the clear sky,
that breathes and lives
this our season,
in your closed silence
is your strength. As
grass lives in the air
you shudder and laugh,
but you are earth.
You are the fierce root.
You are the waiting land.
Cesare Pavese
MYTH
(Mito)
The day will come when the young god will be a man,
without pain, with the man's dead smile
which he has understood. Even the sun spends itself
remote, reddening the beaches. The day will come when the god
will no longer know where the beaches of the past are found.
One wakes up one morning when the summer is dead,
with still a splendour in the raging eyes
as yesterday, and in the ear the roar of the sun
made blood. The colour of the world has changed.
The mountain no longer touches the sky; the clouds
no longer amass like fruit; in water
no longer shining on a pebble. The body of a man
leans over thoughtfully, where a god breathed.
The sun is gone, and the smell of earth,
and the free street, colorful with people
who ignored death. You do not die in the summer.
If someone disappeared, there was the young god
who lived for everyone and ignored death.
On whom sadness was a shadow of cloud.
His pace amazed the earth.
Now fatigue
weighs on all the limbs of man,
without pain, the calm weariness of dawn
which opens a rainy day. The dark beaches
do not know the young man, when once
it was enough that he looked at them.
Nor does the sea of air live again
in the breath. The lips of the man are folded,
resigned, to smile in front of the earth.
Cesare Pavese
AGONY
(Agonia)
I'll walk the streets until I'm dead tired,
I’ll know how to live alone and stare into their eyes,
every face that passes and remains the same.
This chill that rises in search of my veins
is an awakening that I've never felt so true
in the morning: only, I feel stronger
than my body, and a colder tremor
accompanies the morning.
The mornings I was twenty are far off.
And tomorrow, twenty-one: tomorrow I will go out into the streets,
I remember every stone and the sky’s striations.
From tomorrow, people will begin to see me again
and I’ll stand upright, able to dwell
and look in the windows. The mornings of the past,
I was young and didn’t know, not even
that it was myself who was passing by - a woman, mistress
of herself. The thin girl I was,
woke from a cry that lasted for years.
Now it's as if that cry had never been.
And I want only colours. Colours never cry.
I am like an awakening: tomorrow the colours
will return. Each will come out on the street,
every body a colour - even children.
This body is dressed in light red:
after such pallor, he will have his life back.
I will feel the glances around me
and I'll know myself to be: casting a look,
I’ll see myself among the people. Every new morning,
I will go out in the streets in search of colours.
Cesare Pavese
NOCTURNE
(Nocturne)
The hill is nocturnal, in the clear sky.
Your head is framed, and barely moving
it accompanies that sky. You are like a cloud
glimpsed in the branches. It laughs in your eyes,
that strangeness of a sky that yours.
The hill of earth and leaves encloses
with its black mass your living look,
your mouth has the fold of a sweet hollow
between the distant coasts. You seem to play
to the great hill and to the brightness of the sky:
repeat for me the ancient background
and render it more pure.
But you live elsewhere.
Your tender blood has been made elsewhere.
The words you say are not reflected
in the rough sadness of this sky.
You are nothing but a sweet, white cloud
entangled one night among the ancient branches.
Cesare Pavese
YOU DO NOT KNOW THE HILLS
(Tu non sai le colline)
You do not know the hills
where the blood has spread.
We all escaped, we all cast off
the weapon and the name. A woman
watched us flee.
All but one of us:
he stopped, his fist clenched,
he saw the empty sky,
he bowed his head and died
under the wall, keeping silent.
Now all that remains
is a rag of blood
and his name. A woman
waits for us in the hills.
Cesare Pavese
RED EARTH BLACK EARTH
(Terra rossa terra nera)
Red earth black earth,
you come from the sea,
from the parched green
where are ancient words and labour
and geraniums among the stones,
you do not know how much you wear
of sea words and effort,
you rich as a memory,
like the barren country,
you hard and very sweet
ancient word for blood
collected in the eyes;
young, like a fruit
that is memory and season,
your breath reposes
under the August sky,
the olives of your gaze
sweeten the sea,
and you live again
without amazement, certain
like the earth, dark
like the earth, crusher
of seasons and dreams
that is discovered at the moon
most ancient, like
your mother's hands,
the brazier’s basin.
Cesare Pavese
SUMMER
(Estate)
There is a clear garden, between low walls,
of dry grass and light, which slowly bakes
its earth. It is a light that smells of the sea.
You breathe that grass. Touch your hair
and shake your memory.
I saw many sweet fruits
fall with a thud on a grass I know,
So too, you wince at the sudden
movement of blood. You move the head
as all around, a miracle of air happened
and the prodigy is you. There is an equal taste
in your eyes and in warm memory.
Listen.
The words you listen to, just touch you.
You have a clear thought in your calm face
that takes the light of the sea behind you.
You have a silence in your face that presses your heart
with a thud, and it dries an ancient pain
like the juice of fallen fruits.
Cesare Pavese
THE NIGHT YOU SLEPT
Even the night looks like you,
the remote night that cries
silent, inside the deep heart,
and the tired stars pass.
A cheek touches a cheek;
it's a cold shiver, someone
struggles and entreats you, alone,
lost in you, in your fever.
The night suffers and longs for dawn,
poor heart that jolts.
O closed face, dark anguish,
fever that saddens the stars,
there are those like you waiting for the dawn
scrutinizing your face in silence.
You are lying under the night
like a closed dead horizon.
Poor heart that jolts,
one far-off day you were the dawn.
Cesare Pavese
YOU ARE LIKE A LAND
( Tu sei come una terra)
You are like a land
of which no one has ever told me.
You do not wait for anything
if not the word
that will flow from the bottom
like a fruit between the branches.
There is a wind that reaches you.
Things dry and twice-dead
clutter you and drift in the wind.
Limbs and ancient words.
You tremble in the summer.
29 October 1945
Cesare Pavese
YOU HAVE A FACE CARVED FROM STONE
(Hai viso di pietra scolpita)
You have a face carved from stone,
hard earth’s blood,
you came from the sea.
All receive and search
and reject from you
like the sea. In your heart
you have silence, you have swallowed
words. You are dark.
For you, dawn is silence.
And you're like the voices
of the earth - the impact
of the bucket in the well,
the song of fire,
the thud of an apple;
the words resigned
and gloomy on the thresholds,
the child’s cry - things
that never go away.
You do not change. You are dark.
You are the closed cellar,
wrought from the ground,
entered once
by a barefoot boy
who still thinks of it.
You are the dark room
always remembered
like the ancient courtyard
where dawn broke.
November 5, 1945
Cesare Pavese
YOU ALWAYS COME FROM THE SEA
(Sempre vieni dal mare)
You always come from the sea
and you have its hoarse voice,
always with secret eyes
of living water among the brambles,
and a forehead like a low sky with clouds.
Every time you live again
like an ancient thing and wild,
gripping tightly, already known to the heart.
Every time is a tear,
every time is death.
We always fought.
Who determines the impact
has tasted death
and carries it in the blood.
Like good enemies
who no longer hate each other
we have one voice, the same sentence
and we live affronted
under a poor sky.
Between us no pitfalls,
no useless things -
we will always fight.
We will fight again,
we will always fight,
because we are looking for the sleep
of death side by side,
and we have a hoarse voice
a low and wild forehead
and an identical sky.
We were made for this.
If you or I yield to the impact,
it follows a long night
that is neither peace nor truce
and it is not true death.
You are no longer yourself.
Arms argue in vain.
As long as the heart trembles.
They gave your name.
Death begins again.
A thing unknown and wild
you have been reborn from the sea.
19-20 November 1945
Cesare Pavese
LAST BLUES, TO BE READ SOME DAY
It was just one courtship,
surely you knew-
someone was hurt
A long time ago.
Nothing has changed,
a passing of days -
one day you arrived here,
one day you will die.
Someone died
A long time ago-
someone who tried,
but who did not know.
Cesare Pavese
DEATH WILL COME AND HAVE YOUR EYES
(Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi)
Death will come and will have your eyes;
this death that accompanies us
from morning to night, sleepless,
deaf, like an old remorse
or an absurd vice. Your eyes
will be a vain word,
a silent cry, a silence.
You see them so every morning
when you lean across yourself
in the mirror. O dear hope,
that day we too will know
that you are life and you are nothing.
Death has a look for everyone.
Death will come and will have your eyes.
It will be like stopping a vice,
like seeing in the mirror
a dead face re-emerge,
like listening to a closed lip.
We will descend into the silent whirlpool.
Cesare Pavese
YOU, WIND OF MARCH
(Tu, vento di Marzo)
You are life and death.
You came from March
onto bare earth;
your hard shiver.
Spring’s blood
anemone or cloud,
your light step
has violated the earth.
The pain starts again.
Your light step has
reopened pain.
The earth was cold
under a poor sky,
it was still, and enclosed
in a torpid dream,
like those who no longer suffer.
The frost too, was sweet
inside the deep heart.
Between life and death
hope was silent.
Now it has a voice and a blood
every living thing.
Now earth and sky
are a strong shiver,
hope twists them,
it unsettles them in the morning,
your steps flood them,
your breath at dawn.
Spring blood,
the whole earth trembles
with an ancient tremor.
You have reopened the pain.
You are life and death.
Above the bare earth
you passed light
as swallow or cloud,
and the torrent of the heart
has awakened and bursts
and is reflected in the sky
and the objects it reflects
in the sky and the heart
suffer and contort
waiting for you.
It's morning, it's dawn,
blood of spring,
you have violated the earth.
Hope twists,
and waiting for you, it calls you.
You are life and death.
Your step is light.
Cesare Pavese
AUTUMN SONG
(Canzone d’Autunno)
I who restless, asked for passage
From beauty walking on a hill
Ruffled by the wind, I remember
The day of my birth, this earth
Revisited, forgetting in November
The man bent over his wine at the tavern.
And suddenly they came to meet me from the tavern
Those who went before me. Their passage:
Some already a bit drunk in the November
Evening; one has seven hats, the other on the hill
Has lost an eye – leave it on the earth
Streaked with mists the echo of memory.
I who asked the sky for the memory
Of the songs from the tavern
In a choir made of earth,
I hear a voice saying: ‘The passage
Of the burning clouds above the hill
Recall your words of November’.
Among the purple branches one day in November
Roam the huge shadows of remembrance
With me taking refuge on the hill
While stories echo from a tavern
Lost – but not forever – in the passage
Of the short seasons on earth.
And I see the ancestors, the earth
Where I was born one night in November
– month of hidden fevers – the passage
Of the darkened taxi, the memory
Of the woman who carried me in the womb, the tavern
Where my father drank the wine from the hill.
Europe was at war behind the hill
Aflame. It rose from the earth,
The scream of the dead. Over the tavern
They flew, that flock of November
Birds, on the wind of that day I remember
Here, now: my day of passage.
Alberto Nessi
JOURNEY
(Viaggio)
In Camnago I think of my mother
Who is dying
The Lombard sun spreads opaquely on the tracks
And my mother becomes a child,
‘When I look at you I’m almost healed’
She tells me in Desio among the industrial scrap
While a voice from the next compartment
Besmirches the bed
Where my mother is dying. And I am far away
The train runs towards the cleared gardens of Sesto
Clusters of ash feed
The outskirts of Lambrate
Where bushes attach themselves to the drip of the sky
And the haematoma of the haze sketches
the skeleton of ash trees.
Towards Bergamo the dry creepers
Loosen their grip and my mother’s eyes
Are channels that pray along the plain
The pylons are needles
In her pale flesh
She who is dying
While other talk about football on their mobiles
And the mulberries in the windows have arthritic wrists,
The mountains – wounded, white as flames
Without fire –
Deposit hardened faeces in the streets
Of the countryside
And amputated locust trees reveal their stumps
In the escarpments
Next to the brambles’ purple hair.
But the angels of stretcher bearers arrive in Trento
They delicately lift my mother
Under her armpits, her bandages
Become blue and white ribbons
That help you find your way
Above South Tyrol, above the Siberian elms
Above the horse chestnuts above the lime trees
Of Viale della Stazione
Above the old man flinging off
His Tyrolean hat before a glass of grappa
Above the sadness of a Saturday in February
In Merano where a single girl
Slaps her ears with the palms of her hand
As if to kill a scorpion.
Here, now, my mother is sailing over the pains
Of earth with the sail of her hair
With a face that resembles those of my daughters
With the white ribbons of her youth
she arrives in Venice, in Piazza San Marco:
three pigeons
resting on the hands
of an eighteen year old in a photograph.
Alberto Nessi
TALK TO ME
(Parlami)
Talk to me as the yellow marsh marigold
Talk to me within as the breeze from the hill
Don’t leave me with this knot of stupidity
Speak to me like the light that plays
In the happy forest of leaves
Igniting tiny sparks
Talk to me if a green lawns welcomes us
With the tall grass of adolescents:
We two, middle aged, husband and wife.
Alberto Nessi
THE BEAUTIFUL THINGS
(Le cose belle)
I know, but I can’t start singing for joy
If the neighbour hunched over the steering wheel of his jewel
Just changed the brand of oil or cleaned the carburetor
Even more. What do you want me to sing?
Ill tell you more. I am moved by the blade of grass
And there is nothing more mysterious and poignant
Than the great Lombardy sky that fills the evening;
But that rose wine is a fuse
to my rage: you can see them too,
the workers locked in vans. The beautiful things?
I know they exist but Ill tell you about them
In secret, in a low voice, with a little shame.
Alberto Nessi
EXILES
(Esilii)
… plenum exiliis mare, infecti caedibus scopuli.
… the sea is full of exiles, the rocks are poisoned with slaughter.
Tacitus, Historiae, 1, 2
Today I think of two of the many dead by drowning
A few metres from these sunny coasts
Found under the hull, tight, embracing.
I wonder of coral will grow on the bones
And what will become of the blood in the salt.
So I study – I search through my father’s old
Forensic science books
A manual where the victims
Are photographed alongside the criminals
In bulk – suicides, killers, genitals.
No landscapes, only steel sky in these photos,
Rarely a chair, a torso covered by a sheet,
Feet on a cot, naked.
I read, discover the exact term – livor mortis.
The blood collects at the bottom and clots
First red, then livid, finally becomes dust
And it can – yes – dissolve in salt.
Antonella Anedda
DEAR WATER
(Cara acqua)
Dear water, I always look at you
Even if you’re not there, if you run elsewhere
or hole up in the hollow of a rock.
I see you too, when you become
The invisible, languid drop,
Because I saw you shine
In certain dawns. It was as though
A thin smoke rose from you
And little leaves caressed you slowly;
Insects and many wings brushed against you,
A thousand shining wing cases.
And I trust you
Even when you threaten, and you swell
Even when you sweep all before you.
The days, the bridges, the roof.
And me also.
Fabio Pusterla
THE FIRST STRAWBERRIES
(Le prime fragole)
You crawl in the white grass of daisies.
You're dressed in red, a red bonnet on your head,
and in your right hand a carrot peeler that you stick
in the still soft ground of March, always advancing
slowly in the thick of the lawn. Lying down
on the grass, with daisies in your eyes. I am climbing
Everest, you tell me. And your cheeks too, are red with joy.
You crawled yesterday in your Everest of daisies
and I look at you today in memory and meanwhile I listen to the radio
waiting for its dreadul news, and you keep crawling, happy,
and the radio tells of the girl crushed in Gaza.
You prepare a potion with bird feather to learn to fly,
I prepare for you the year's first strawberries and I wonder
at his eyes, and what they understand,
the man who drove the tank.
Fabio Pusterla
THREE APPARITIONS AT WASSEN
(Tre Apparizioni a Wassen)
1
A girl’s shadow
On the sad humidity of the glass
A wet escarpment juts out into the void
A church perched, centuries-old cemetery
Water pouring from a basin between stones
Chills of landslide sediments avalanches
A valley of fleeing wind
Without prospects
An exhausted future
Today I’d prefer not to speak
I cannot talk
Please don’t ask me questions
They’re just a useless thing
If every morning is merely sadness
A great sadness
that sometimes crushes me in bed
like a black mountain
above the pink scabious
but today I’m here and elsewhere
I’m here and I don’t know where
Almost standing speechless
Please leave me in silence
Don’t question me
2
Second apparition: very far away
A grey ribbon running
Towards a vague copper glow
An unlikely opening in the bottlenecks
Racing cars unreachable
We won’t be able to pass
Not us maybe others
Not us inert boulders for millennia
In the narrow reverse of the meadows
I have distant friends I’ve never seen
Friends whose nicknames I don’t know
With them I’m fine with them I can
Isolate myself, it is a deep unshaken friendship
I don’t go out much, that’s true,
Hardly ever, and when I do I slide
Between the bodies
I don’t look don’t look at me
They are the colour of a gallery
The round empty space
In the innards of something
I smile sometimes
3
Further down the third: mud, stones,
The houses overlook us, the ridges above the houses
Swooping, suspended in the clouds,
Overhangs threaten, and a violent
Greenish water roars on one side
Erodes, destroys clinging things
Bodies roots embankments
The church appears to rise shuddering
The sky’s no longer visible the rail line
Vanishes into darkness
Everything is eaten up
No, never have I been
In hospital, I’m careful, I don’t allow
Myself distraction. I am alert, present,
A kilo from being hospitalised. Intelligent,
I know; and strict with myself.
But maybe I’ve learned not to pretend
Absolute perfection: it’s better this way.
Pressure from others has eased
Wolves hardly ever knock on the door anymore
Though you can hear them breathing out there
White feathers black masks.
But I’m better
In my secret, a little better, maybe.
Fabio Pusterla
BEYOND SAVOGNA, TOWARDS THE ISONZO RIVER
(Oltre Savogna, verso l’Isonzo)
For Mario Carnelut
I know everything must end
like the streets when they narrow
until they become one with the fields
today I thought about death and wished
it could be like getting lost in the grass
behind my mother’s house
we walked as far as the railway
and seeing the train it was already there
the idea of a distant past
where one day we’d have gone.
Francesco Tomada
THE PROMISED LAND
(La Terra Promessa)
I wanted to write about them
but was wondering how
since I didn’t know what they’d run from
or maybe I’m afraid to imagine it.
They walk in small groups
and no one speaks
dozens are waiting outside Carlita’s
at dinner time.
Someone calls, others stare at the street.
Only a few smile.
They sleep on the bank of the Isonzo
yet their clothes are neat and clean.
I wanted to write about them
also of Taimur
but yesterday the river took him.
Francesco Tomada
CHRISTMAS EVE
(Vigilia di Natale)
You bought a big loaf of bread today.
Laughing, you set it in the middle of the table
It weighs a kilo and I only paid ninety cents for it.
wasn’t I in luck?
I, on the other hand, have just been leafing
through the headlines of the Corriere.
In a Syrian city whose name I don’t remember
one hundred people died in a bombing
they too were in line for bread.
I take a piece and chew it
I taste it as I rarely happen to do
I look at you
you were right, you were lucky
but you don’t how.
Francesco Tomada
I DON’T TELL YOU DAD
(A te papà non racconto)
how as a child you seemed invincible to me
when you wore your military uniform
when you arranged the mortars
when you fired the rifle
and I felt you’d protect me forever
How things changed growing up
you neglected me at first and then forgot
because I wasn’t the kind of child you wanted
How you made me jump
a whole flight of stairs with a single kick
I was wrong but your anger
wasn’t just against me
How I later discovered you miserable and mean
how among the few things you taught me
the most important, the real one
How I was a presumptuous teenager
convinced that he’s always right
How you haven’t phoned for over twenty years
and I’d call you only for birthdays
forgetting a few but with no sense of guilt
How it’s just you and me now
how I still believe I was right
how now that you’re old you have lost all your power
no longer invincible, indeed
already vanquished
How you look at me with the too transparent eyes
of those who no longer remember anything
asking me the most important and trivial things in the same tone
How I’m unable to forgive you
but at least I try to forget and hope that’s enough
I’ve been waiting a long time for a possible revenge
and now I don’t need it anymore
how you only trust me now
and I don’t know if this is your way of loving me
or just holding on to me because you need me
if this is my way of loving you
or just looking after you out of a pure sense of duty
How it is useless even to ask oneself
because whatever it is we have to hold on to it
it’s all we have left
Francesco Tomada
THREE DIVIDED BY TWO
(Tre Diviso Due)
I remember one day we were joking
If we left what would become of our children
One and a half each?
Would we cut them in half?
It was a stupid joke
Now that it seems to have come true
There is a reality where everyone gets lost
And three divided by two is zero.
Francesco Tomada
1920
There is this photo from the last century
where the house we now live in is destroyed
an Italian grenade had hit it
this very house, this very room
where our children were conceived
but there are no images of those moments of ours
and when life explodes inside it makes no sound
and I too have possessed you so they say
But in truth I own nothing
you are like this land where to leave a mark
it’s useless to fight: you have to belong,
become humble and dwell patiently
as does the colour on a rose
Francesco Tomada
I SAW
(Senza titolo)
I saw:
the body of a dead mole on the asphalt
on the almost decomposed remains of the ears
two blue butterflies flapping their wings
they seemed to want to lift it
a beauty absolute but sad
I thought:
so angels really exist
but they can’t carry us to heaven
Francesco Tomada
NURSING HOME, PODSABOTIN
(Casa di Riposa, Podsabotin)
A woman is dozing
on a chair in the refectory
her face is leaning to one side
mouth wide open in a soundless cry
behind her a parrot in a cage
it used to sing the nurse tells us
as a drizzle of drool dries
Now he doesn’t sing any more
or perhaps by dint of being here
instead of words he learned to repeat silence
silence
silence
silence
and even if the woman were to open her eyes
waking up is another thing entirely
I envy those who aren’t afraid of dying
I have a lot of fear
but what scares me even more
is to continue living dead.
Francesco Tomada
CARRY ON WITH GOODBYES
(Portarsi avanti con gli addii, pt. II)
Silence is the stuff tree trunks are made of
the stones
and often too, my mother
It’s the robin killed by the cat
decomposing at the bottom of the garden
Silence cements the mortar of the walls
tightens round the driven nails
will dwell in the rooms when our children
are gone
You and I, we’ll have
to empty that silence like a piggy bank
to see if first of all
we’d filled it up
Francesco Tomada
THE YEARS OF LEAD
(Gli anni di piombo)
When they found the body of Aldo Moro
in the boot of a red Renault
or
when the Communist party
got more votes than the Christian Democrats
I remember the absolute silence of my father
I imagine he thought What will happen now?
but he didn’t say it
It’s the same silence with which he looks at us today
his brother my children and me
with no understanding now of who we are
His whole life spent fighting
against the wrong enemy
In the end it wasn’t Communism
but the disease
that made us all
mercilessly alike
Francesco Tomada
WHEN THEY TOLD YOU
(Quando ti Hanno Detto)
For G.N.
What a beautiful word it is: to nest
it gives the idea of returning to take root
‘The cells have nested
on the upper wall of the liver
in metastases from the pulmonary dwelling.’
I keep these lines ten centimetres from my heart
to try to understand
if they are really dedicated to me
it’s not the first time
re-reading my poems scared me
they say what I was carrying inside without knowing
but I didn’t write this one
and among them all
this is the hardest.
Francesco Tomada
ALESSIO LOVES ROSES
(Non ci sono più le stagioni di una volta)
I don’t even know what I was hoping for him
that he become an engineer, maybe
or a biologist like me.
Instead Alessio loves roses.
When he comes across a beauty
he breaks off a slip and plants it in the garden,
he waters it and cares for it until it roots.
And any colour of bloom is fine,
he likes it if it’s what he’d expected
if it’s different he’s surprised and smiles.
‘You can’t impose colour on a rose’
So I who have so often lived my spring
am now discovering his.
Francesco Tomada
WITHOUT WINE
(Senzavino)
My grandfather used to say that eating
without wine on the table
reminded him of the war years
my grandmother outlived him a long time
when she too died
we found twelve hundred empty bottles
lined up like soldiers along the wall
behind the woodshed
in recent years she’d sit on the sofa after lunch
with a strange smile I didn’t understand at the time
I thought it was because of something on the television
instead
she had taken advantage of the peace
Francesco Tomada
DARKNESS COMES EARLY
(Viene Buio Presto)
The table with dirty dinner plates
a bottle of wine half drunk
and I think about when we swore
to stay together forever
we lied
eternity doesn’t exist
to love is a verb which has meaning only in the present tense
so before you can tidy up
I reach out my hand to hold yours
like children who don’t want to sleep
because they’re afraid
of never waking up again
Francesco Tomada
PREVAL
Sometimes it happens that butterflies
flow over the windscreen caught in the rush of the wind
without even touching the glass
and reaching the back of the car return to flight as before
they can’t even scream in fright
they’re so delicate
you might lift them with your hand
indeed, indeed
I’d like to be a butterfly thrower by trade
and at the end of a working day
not having to count banknotes at the cash desk
or check the marks written on the register
but look up at a sky
teeming with wings
Francesco Tomada
I DON’T KNOW HOW TO SAY GOODBYE
(Io non so dire addio)
(to a friend)
You often tell me I speak too little
it’s that sometimes what I want to say would hurt you
or maybe the words I’m looking for weren’t even made up
or maybe both together
for example
what’s the past tense of ‘we’?
Francesco Tomada
CAVE DEL PREDIL
The mine has been closed for twenty years but here everything is still a mine.
The houses were built for workers, the museum took over
the factory where lead was purified, the slope of the mountain
is an accumulation of rocks extracted from below.
When it snows, the flakes are large and slow, just like when
you turn those transparent spheres with a landscape upside down
.
Turn that sphere upside down again.
Let the snow collect in the concavity of the sky.
May the earth descend into the void of the tunnels from which it came.
May all men ascend safe, back to a time before
silicosis and pleurisy. To the feast of Santa Barbara, when they wore
their suits of twenty-nine gold buttons and the proud look of one
who every day goes down into the earth and truly splits it.
Francesco Tomada
THE MEASURE
(La Misura)
Ten centimetres between my car
and the nearest in the parking lot
Ten centimetres too, between your body and mine
last night we didn’t make love
we’d have liked to
but there was something between us: tiredness
or silence of neglected words
or fear of not finding
the confidence of other times
And they say length
is something absolute and measurable
Ten centimetres
between two cars is a space
between us is a chasm.
Francesco Tomada
I KNOW HOW BUTTERFLIES DIE
(So come muiono le farfalle)
I know how butterflies die
like a man lying on his back on a meadow
they look at all the sky they have
crossed and then
spread their wings over the grass
to ward off fatigue
and they think forever of flying
Francesco Tomada
TRENITALIA
Fortunately I rarely frequent the stations
With their fleeting relief of delays,
The long, long moment of the train
Moving off
Since on the platform
Departure tastes of abandonment
And the hoardings have nothing to say
To those who remain.
Francesco Tomada
ASK YOURSELF WHY
(Chiedersi perché)
Ask yourself why
butterflies never fly straight
but follow a broken track
jagged
making no sense
And answer for yourself:
if today I found myself capable of flying
I would fill myself with space and air
I wouldn’t waste my time
deciding on a route
if you really have to die so fast
let it be from too much joy
from too great a wind
Francesco Tomada
I HAVE BEEN A FATHER TO MY FATHER
(Ho fatto de padre a mio padre)
I have been a father to my father
perhaps we have swapped places
to understand if such a thing could work
I held him firmly in bed
when he tried to get up but couldn’t
he tried to hit me
I let myself be insulted and
I cleaned him when he needed to be cleaned
only the skin stuck to his bones remained
then one day he told me
I would never have done this for you
I don’t know, I really don’t
but I must have learned from someone
Francesco Tomada
NO MAN’S LAND
Here
in the middle of the road signs
Italia, Slovenija
here
on the railway embankment
bushes grow
They were young, they were seeds
they had the roots and patience
to embrace this land
once called no one’s
Now it’s theirs
Francesco Tomada
A SUDDEN LONELINESS
(Una Solitudine Improvvisa)
The usual story they told everyone:
you can’t go out in the dark
the wolf is out there
I was hiding under the covers
while my mother stroked my hair
You see it
in the end the wolf is there for real
they caught a glimpse of him tonight
on the road to Cepovan
I hug the duvet as once I did
but my mother doesn’t came back
Francesco Tomada
FOR STEFANIA, AT LAST
(a Stefania, finalmente)
You were too small to be a woman and older sister
how impossible it seemed that you were a mother
how impossible it seemed to die in childbirth
in the year of Our Lord two thousand
You weighed less than this surname of today
I carry it alone. If you could take it
in your arms and lift it as I did with you
I would be a different man, I’d have a smile
easier to pass on to my children
Francesco Tomada
“these are the lines I was looking for for Rose”
(Sono queste le righe che cercavo per Rose)
What’s in the museum at Auschwitz
There are shoes enough to fit
the feet of an entire generation
glasses to see all the sights of Europe
Suitcases for millions
of possible returns home
All these objects have remained unchanged
the names on the labels the dried mud on the shoes
only one thing kept going on -
I just can’t call it living –
There is a whole room full of hair
turned grey on the floor waiting
for the young of that time
whose old age never found them.
Francesco Tomada
HEREDITY
(Ereditarietà)
There’s this black and white photo
in which Riccardo is identical
to his grandfather.
They say certain characteristics
skip a generation
then reappear the same
I think about my anger
what exists without reason or cure
At least
my children are safe.
Francesco Tomada
ITALY
(L’Italia)
In my life I’ve bought and transplanted a single tree
a pomegranate
I chose a corner of the garden
from where you can see the ring of mountains
from San Gabriele all the way to Nanos
the crest was Italy, then Yugoslavia and now Slovenia
it was a land of pain and rancour
borders should be like horizons
when you move they move too
if you stop they stop with you
but they always make you feel in the exact centre of the world
and homeland is where
a man plants a pomegranate
and can wait to eat its fruits
Francesco Tomada
THE NINTH ANNIVERSARY
(Il nono anniversario)
Women who die in childbirth become spirits
Letovane, they are called
at night you can hear them along the River Stella
washing the clothes of the family that was theirs
in short, they help out for as long as they can
Because this story from la Bassa
comes to mind now
Stefania there are days when I can almost not think about you.
not today
not today when our mother
asked to celebrate a mass for you
surely she also brought you some flowers
not today as I look at the disorder in the house
the pile of dirty laundry overflowing from the drum
and I begin to wash
Francesco Tomada
CYPRESSES
(Senza titolo)
Such obstinacy in the cypresses
other lants lose their leaves
with them, on the other hand, no, that never happens
My grandfather kept repeating:
in life you must always be
straight-backed
They say the trees know how to listen
and here they are, in the November grey
rigid and pointing upwards
as if they had to keep
a grip on the clouds
Francesco Tomada
I NEVER WANTED TO TALK ABOUT MY SISTER
(Non volevo più parlare di mia sorella)
Now I’d like to forget about her
enough is enough
but everyone’s always telling me
how she was always more cheerful than me
and this little man’s head of mine
holds few things but those
which churn inside and never come out
To forget more quickly
I haven’t brought a single flower to her grave
but then in spring thousands of them bloom everywhere
And it’s not just because of the snow
that I prefer winter
Francesco Tomada
ON THE DAY OF THE FORTY-NINTH BIRTHDAY
(Nel giorno del quarantanovesimo compleanno)
I’m on the tip of life now
from here you can view it far
in every direction
My grandfather sleeping in the armchair
with a brown cat on his lap
The ball kicked towards the garage door
once in every thirty tries it hits the target
and I become Anastasi
My mother’s small breasts under her dressing gown
when she bent over to make the beds and then you
when I first saw your body
I thought finally
the world had forgiven me
The children that my children
say they never want
and we hope that at least one has a child
I who am ageing worse than you until
on the street you’ll have to begin
holding my hand again
everything is here and now
The care with which my grandfather chose his words
has become my silence
a deflated ball to kick in the garden
everything is here now
And like an amputated limb
I already feel the warmth of the hand
you haven’t given me yet
Francesco Tomada
SALVAGED SOULS
(Anime salve)
Ten years ago, I changed my children’s clothes
I washed their nakedness and dirt
before I had them I thought it would be strange
but no
Today I do the same with you
and that absolutely modesty that has always been with us
it no longer exists, neither
is there shame
I first learned to be a father
and only then, a son
it took time, Mum, but I did it
Now you can go
Francesco Tomada
I LIVE HERE PART 2
(Io vivo qui pt. 2)
I want to describe a horizon to you.
From the lope of Podgora to the basin of the city rests
and then up to the dark tip of il Sabotino
will be three kilometres as the crow flies.
Now I want to measure it:
To fill the sky you need a handful of swallows in flight,
ninety years ago four hundred thousand soldiers died to take this land.
Gorizia has ten thousand inhabitants, for each of us
there are ten dead.
Swallows, on the other hand, are not enough for everyone.
For this reason, when one arrives, it is spring.
Francesco Tonada
WHAT I CAN TEACH MY CHILDREN
(Quello che posso insegnare ai figli)
In the meantime, learn the simple things
not like yesterday, when you when you went into
the road without looking
I hugged you then out of fear
shouting
you explained how the engine
could not be heard
In the meantime learn two simple things
tomorrow’s cars will be even quieter
and it can’t be said that the one who waits for you
will always be someone who loves you
Francesco Tomada
HALF EMPTY, HALF FULL
(Mezzo Vuoto, Mezzo Pieno)
I watch you and always think of many things
I wish I had more time
and more attention from you
instead you’re always there for the children
and consume yourself
as I could never do
But when I stay in the margin of your sight
there’s still a beauty in seeing you
when all is said and done
not even flowers bloom for us
Francesco Tomada
I THINK OF YOU
(Penso per te)
It’s as they said
your children remain so forever
and even now that you’re taller than me
your beard longer
in short, you are all that I am
all I will never be able to become
before crossing the street, if I could
I’d take you by the hand
I’d tell you to be careful
watch where you put your feet
check your steps
count them, one by one
always ask yourself where you started from
where you’re going
and above all with whom
Francesco Tomada
OUR LADY OF DISORDER
(Nostra Signora del Disordine)
We’re always emptying and filling boxes
we move clothes in the closers
take something to the attic or basement
constantly on the move
even if we live in the same house
you’re never satisfied and I
don’t understand, I don’t understand you anymore
living doesn’t mean
that objects have a place where they belong
but rather
that we do.
Francesco Tomada
THE EARTHQUAKE OF ‘76
(Il terremoto del ’76)
When the ’76 earthquake came
it was evening and I was eight
we all ran out into the courtyards
as we were, we children already in pyjamas
I remember the house shaking in the dark
and I never thought it could fall
but I was afraid, afraid of the noise
and why the earth moved
and the air remained still
an unknown thing
the opposite of the wind
Francesco Tomada
PRUNING
(Potature)
Today I cut the branches
that had grown in front of your window
you couldn’t see outside anymore
the light couldn’t get in
For you, Mother, I’d have wished a house
with a larger courtyard and a vegetable garden to cultivate
But the money wasn’t there
so I cleared the sky above your garden
it measures only a hundred square metres, not much
but at least they’re made of infinity
Francesco Tomada
THE FLOOD OF NOVEMBER 5TH
(La piena del 5 novembre)
Water whips the pylons of the bridge
and slams on the banks as if to say
from today, all this is mine again
and meanwhile it takes logs and rubble
and the body of a drowned roe deer
On physical maps the Isonzo
is an almost delicate blue line
We can draw the path of a river
but not its anger
Francesco Tomada
***************************************
SPANISH
REVELATION OF LIFE
And suddenly I said this is life
and no more. I touched its certainty,
guessed it mortal. My soul, alerted,
trembled an instant, core-shaken.
With a great jolt, new love - life, wind! -
opened the ultimate door.
And there at the open room's end,
my death sleeping shone in the half-light.
This is life, I said, this is death,
this the gleaming, the deep even light,
cosmic passion, immovable sleep.
Yes, you are just this. And to see you
I gravely advanced to the end
and turned the key in the door.
Vicente Gaos
ON SELF-KNOWLEDGE
Foaming, mad, far from forgotten birth,
the river batters fords, knocks oak, gouges hills;
majestic, fickle-flooding, sails to irrevocable
ocean-drowning, the nothing of its path.
As vain your cloaking misery in pride,
man, child of nothingness and soil,
neglecting in ambition's futile moil
the suckling-drop, the wind-bared mountain-side.
Pedro Espinosa
ON LAND
If it dies on land
take my voice to the level,
and leave it there on that shore.
To sea-level take it,
make it master
of a white man-of-war
O my voice spangled
with sailors' insignias:
on the heart an anchor,
on the anchor a star,
on the star a wind,
on the wind a sail!
Rafael Alberti
MESSAGES FOR THE WOMAN OF WINTERS
Here, today, in the desperation of winters
I lean on your side, woman of secrets and flames
I want to sow in your breast the kisses of time
and in the summer to come, gather the harvest in your bed.
Already you wish that it be your name people pronounce,
that it tells of the inexhaustible road we cross;
but I ask of you silence: that you only sing the whisper in the darkness,
I want only the bell of your voice among my rough ears,
I want only your legs like trees immovable in my hands
because of the revival of all the rains which bring to the hills
this downpour which returns, bursting through the tongue,
this thunderclap which opens in a scream to the stars.
But I ask of you silence, so that we fence in our little peace,
so that we shut the gates to the stranger,
and we live the multitudes of this universe
in the swift, rotund boat of your lips.
Santiago Azar
IMAGES
The more a man lives, the more images pass
by the cooled moon of the mirror
he holds before his eyes
images
of the beloved, living and dead.
Some go and return: others
remain, vanishing into time
until they are mere shadows
in the dark, bleak plateau of memory.
Ah, absent images
of those who already flee
never to return,
never to return; those without paths
to lead them back.
Images of those
who, restless clouds, pass
through our thoughts when passing
behind the veiled moon of the mirror!
José Jurado Morales
BLACK SWALLOWS
The black swallows will return
to nest on your balcony,
their wings as they hang at play
knocking on your window pane
but those who paused to see
your loveliness and my unmeasured luck,
who learned our murmured names - they
will not come back!
The thick honeysuckles will return
to climb your garden walls,
will open to evening again
their flowers even more beautiful
but those, dew-curded, whose rolling
drops we saw tremble and fall
clear as day's tears -
they will never reappear!
Once more your ears will burn
to words of love; perhaps
something in them will stir
your heart from its deep sleep;
but kneeling, mute, as men
worship at God's altar:
that you'll know love again
as I have loved you? Never!
Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
ANNUNCIATION
A shout in the street
and the sun, like a wound
caused by fire
debates with the earth
swollen with flowers.
A boy calls
passionate and violent
with yearning for a lost bird
waking from their sleep
lovers damp with heat.
And when the corner is turned
the street alone again
eager and feline
waits for the hour:
the frontier of love and death.
Teresinha Pereira
MARGARITA
The evening is cloudy and grey...
the steely sea lukewarm
and the hills green.
With a rose in your hair,
how the universe of stars
reflects your lovely body!
Manuel Chacon-Calvo
NATIVITY
Beggar heart.
Any gate opens to your silence.
And in your two supplicant hands,
the bread of every day comes into being.
The road will end with day’s death,
and night, spangled, open itself in your weariness.
Heart! You hold a bloody rose,
whose thorn grips you fast.
Rest; the dagger in the rose is bleeding,
and yet hope is generous.
Heart, look at the sky; raise your head.
Don’t you see the star up there?
Home is near and the night has already laid out its bed.
A bed of honey, incense and myrrh.
Ibis Vazquez Lopez
WOMAN
Will I see no more
your sweet face
like an August night
with a breeze of jasmines?
Manuel Chacon-Calvo
A DREAM
Limestone street
And sun of song.
Humidity. Heat. Horses.
And this heat which
- awake –
no water slakes.
Bruno Molinaro
LOVERS, METAPHOR FOR IRONWORKS
Lovers are
like the nut and screw
coiled round each other
and God is the indifference and the pliers
that unscrews them.
When through rain and time
lovers rust
and remain irredeemably stuck
then only the Devil and his hacksaw
can uncouple them.
Raul Acaves
REQUIEM FOR THE CHERRY TREES
Poet, the cherry tree is blossoming tears
above the fineness of the tomb,
it welcomes you as a distinguished guest.
The oxen are wearing purple garlands
and their horns are growing smaller
the herons whiten the lake
and at the bottom the ridges
darn a star into your destiny
with the splendour of their scales.
The wind roars behind the mountains
like a lioness in heat
the birds listen to her roars
and waken with their flight
the mildness of the river of faces
where millions of stones light up
to form a rainbow forest.
Poet, when you die the sky covers itself
with sequins extracted
from the clothing of uncertainty.
The visible footprints of winter
stretch out along its length.
The guardian of ice trails in solitude
its steps towards Mount Fuji.
Daniel J Montoly
NIGHT ILLUSION
I felt my heart split by an enigma
the night hidden, the space
between my footsteps dug up,
dark limbs drunkenly longing
for a voice or a finger
raised above the shoulders
of my anguish: but only silence
and a shadow seen in a tunnel.
A smothered face in the grass
appeared at my steps, to seal my lips
with its Medusa’s kisses.
Everything beneath my feet is ruled by the scaffold.
My heart is a flower
exposed to the mist.
Daniel J Montoly
ATLANTIS SLEEPING
You cross in darkness with my mouth
like a syllable pronounced
on the tip
of the tongue;
with no punctuation
to hinder
your reading.
But my clumsy lips
cannot manage
to adore
the abundance
of your body
because you exceed
the longed-for sea
below the nightly gazes
of moons
which sing to you
erotic boleros.
I go staggering
touching every contour
which proclaims
the islands of your hips
like a miner
risking the fury
of a falling cliff.
You blaze
like a newly-lit fire
which the north wind incites
with melodies repeated
with the red of feasts.
You yield, sleeping Atlantis
to the plundering of the palate
which conquers you
with its tambours of foam
whose echoes of fire
canonise themselves
in your senses.
Daniel J Montoly
THE MOSAICS OF ALEXANDRIA
I went with you, scarab
and I sprouted wings
on exile’s road.
I flew. I flew tirelessly
as far as the abyss
before which everything collapses
but oblivion stretched out her arms, scarab,
and I forgot the shadow of the Sphinx
was the same as mine.
Daniel J Montoly
TO KARMEN BLASQUEZ
The trees die but the dream lives on – Pound
The moon spreads out
a path of ridges
not come across before.
The word flourishes,
lost, forgotten,
where the leaves live on;
dream of a tree which vanishes in the night.
Daniel J Montoly
TO MY MOTHER
Twilight, speak to the wind
that reaches my good mother
and tell her that I feel
for her an immense pain,
that when I look at the mists
of the distant riverbanks
their thin foams trickling
are as her grey hair,
that in each sea breeze
I see the weft of a smile
from a far evening
and that at sea or on land
I always kiss the medal
I took from her breast.
Bruno Molinaro
NIGHT
The estranged
will alienate you
will not mourn your dead
to those
who speak to you of discord
(your children) you’ll call
and bit by bit
as in a clumsy dream
your magic will cease.
Bruno Molinaro
BETWEEN LIFE AND DEATH
(Entre la Vida y la Muerte)
Darkly the swallows cross the blue sky of your hope.
And it was a life more beautiful than your dreams,
a promise intact, remaining unfulfilled,
you forever turning like a troubled wave,
waiting for love. Such was your life
and at the same time your diary of death.
To love and not love yourself,
this was your sin. And your harsh penance.
Julián Marquez Rodriguez
NO ONE IS A PROPHET IN HIS OWN MIRROR
(Nadie es Profeta en su Espejo)
Tell me, do you still feel the old wound
when love bathes you in its swell
and the kiss is a light as love is a suit
and the lips are thirst as the night is life?
Tell me yes, yes of course, as you tell me
and not with an abandoned sadness
when the kiss is already faded to nothing
on the martyred lips of the novice.
You, my immediate, my only,
the rain which came to live with me,
my voice is wheat when it names you, wheat,
my body a bridge when it hugs you, a bridge.
You, my daily, my eternal, my first ,
the night which joins itself to the day
when happiness crackles in the flesh
and the sea waits at the door of the room,
and the mirror is a shivering water
and he water slowly climbs the hill
where your body fills the horizon
and I see the same when I'm in a dream.
Luis Rosales
NOT
(No)
It's not the words, no,
nor the full stops, not the commas,
those which give voice to the stone
and colour to the rose.
It's not when I call your name,
when my tongue names you
and saturated with your essence
it illuminates my mouth.
It's only when silence
grows around me and deepens in me
to embrace me in your body
that I enter into the soul of things.
Juan Cervera
SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION
At school we sent each other
secret messages
written with invisible ink
on leaf of a notebook.
We had to rub a flame
along the page’s underside
and the words would appear
as if by magic.
I still recall that evening
when you left a message
in a drawer of my desk;
with a trembling hand
I lit the match but held it
so close to the paper
that the page caught fire.
And that was our basic schooling:
the dawn of love,
the beginnings of fire,
reveal the beloved’s message
or reduce it to ashes.
And there is no second chance.
Óscar Hahn
LOVERS’ GARDEN
On these trees grow fragrant fruits.
The fruits ripened and fell to the ground
lovers picked them up and bit them
from their mouths dripped a crystal water.
The water impregnated earth and sky
from the earth were born trees which levitated
from these trees fell fruits in love.
Óscar Hahn
VIOLIN
This tree holds a violin inside
which hasn’t been carved yet.
It waits the day of resurrection,
the tree within.
Signor Stradivarius says:
‘I have to rescue this violin,
Remove the crust which imprisons it
and see it breathe fresh air.
I have to hear it sing for me.’
This violin holds a tree inside,
holds flowers which listen to silent music,
holds birds.
Óscar Hahn
BONE
Curious is the bone’s persistence
its stubbornness in the struggle against dust
its resistance to changing into ash:
the flesh is fainthearted,
it resorts to the scalpel, to ointments and mascaras,
make-up for the countenance of death,
Late or early the flesh will be dust,
castle of ash, sweepings for the wind.
One day the spade which excavates the earth
will clash with something hard; neither rock nor diamond,
it is a tibia, a femur, a couple of ribs,
a jawbone which once spoke
and now wishes it could speak.
All the bones speak, punish, accuse,
they raise towers against oblivion,
trenches of whiteness which glisten in the night.
A hero of the resistance, this bone!
Óscar Hahn
CRUSOE’S MESSAGE TO THE SHIPWRECKED
There are no certainties behind so much waiting.
Castaways that populate any of the islands
of this sea of silence, after so many years,
admit once and for all that you have been forgotten.
Perhaps ships passed or could they have been dreams:
You listened to songs made of white foam
that came from afar to intoxicate the senses.
Do not look at the water anymore. The sea is not salvation,
but your madness. The waves offer nothing.
Your faith already lost, look no more to the sea.
Direct your steps with certainly inland,
without yearning any more for luck. Master your islands,
prepare the harvest and receive the fruits.
Raise your house on firm foundations,
as if you were to live there until death,
the one expected visitor who will make land.
Make sure you are completely alone
and order solitude without anger or discouragement,
as if nobody would ever find you.
Irene Sánchez Carrón
AT THE END
The eyes see, the heart feels - Octavio Paz
Few things hurt. Let's say, for example,
that you can suddenly not love and it doesn’t hurt.
Love hurts if it happens
boiling through the veins.
Loneliness hurts,
whiplash of ice.
The lack of love doesn’t hurt. It is an expected visit.
The disenchantment doesn’t hurt. It's just something uncomfortable.
This is how we are, mortals, hopelessly used
to the certainty that everything ends.
Irene Sánchez Carrón
BLIND WATER
Habit brings me to your body
or the need of the planets.
That blind habit of seed,
that makes water go blindly down the throat,
the one that guides migratory birds
year after year by the same route,
the one that drives from remoteness
this breeze that now messes
your hair. Your smile,
the habits of the sun in your system.
Irene Sanchez Carrón
HANDS PAINTING IN A CAVE
You spend the hours looking at your hands.
In this darkness your hands are fire and torches.
There is a feeling that touches the walls of your soul.
Your hands look like bare trees,
pathways that are lost in dreams.
When you open your hands it is as if you show a treasure.
So early on, you picked up the blood
and the smell of impatience pours down the cave.
The blood is strange.
The hands are strange.
Frenziedly you dip your hands in the blood a thousand times.
Frantically print your hands a thousand times
in the stone’s harsh silence.
Irene Sánchez Carrón
A MATURE WOMAN MAKES AN APPOINTMENT
Before the fiction of the soul
And the lie of emotion – Pessoa
We move with such ease. Our elegance is so,
turn around me so that I, detained in my space, can contemplate you.
Now you want to burn yourself and that's why you approach.
You approach, you want to burn yourself
I pretend I don’t see you, I pretend to ignore you.
I ask you who you are and, at the same time, I put a finger on your lips.
"Don’t. I don’t want to hear your voice. Don’t tell me your name.
That was agreed upon.”
At night, in the garden, I open my heart among the honeysuckle.
"I like to walk supported on your arm,
to think that I have known you forever,
that we have not seen each other for many years. "
I speak of lost ideals,
of that life which put everything in its place.
"Oh, life." I miss a sigh
and life is very brief for me.
I say that I was always in the exact place at the exact moment.
I always say those things.
Then I hug you and kiss you on the lips.
"Let's go to my house"
I let you drive and I remember the Beatles song
"Baby you can drive my car and Baby I love you ..."
Through the mirror the key turns and I hear
the abracadabras of the seven bolts.
Everything was planned in a Neverland,
seven lamps are lit on a switch
that illuminate very specific places.
We no longer have virgins left to keep the candles lit
awaiting the return of the bridegroom,
the one that never returns - well it’s true, because it’s never the same.
"I’d like to go up the stairs undressing like they do on TV"
I say and I laugh.
I hope to see the sunrise so I can look at you
and later never see you again.
That was agreed upon.
At night, in the garden, I open my heart among the honeysuckle.
In the bathroom I take off my makeup.
On the sink snow, cotton, red, black and ochre.
I stop to look at the green of the eye shadow.
I think of the shadows and the sad servitude of my eyes
and I think of the carmine that no longer melts between the lips
and on distant trams loaded with desire
and the clarity of the day that awaits me hurts
and I would like to ruin myself like Gil de Biedma.
Irene Sánchez Carrón
AGELESS
It's late for the rose.
It's early for winter. – Dulce M. Loynaz
Today I dream that you walk beside me
and our shadows play on the ground
as graceful birds which never grow old.
And the ageless shadow of your hand
caresses a place on the floor
where my heart could be
And the shadeless shadow of my lips
look for the exact place
where to leave the kisses, the words.
Loneliness is only
the weight of your name in memory.
Irene Sánchez Carrón
ORACLE
You did not cross that bridge
You did not cross that bridge and your remote mossy voice
will be forever entangled in your footsteps.
You were afraid to go down the stairs
and a black precipice of rungs
It will open at your feet every morning.
From today
all beds
where you look for rest
will be filled with wells
and will fall confused
by your face and your masks.
Irene Sánchez Carrón
DAWN
While you sleep, I look at you.
Remember me
the cold of the sources on the lips,
the meadow below the back,
the indecipherable dance of the clouds,
the sweet taste of tiny fingers in the dough,
the earth in the nails,
wet feet in the puddles,
the pockets full.
With you next to me
the days recover the soft texture of wax
and repeat the dawn a thousand times.
With you next to me
I see a long sadness go by.
Irene Sánchez Carrón
THE SOUTH, THE DREAM
That vain habit that inclines me
To the South, to a certain door, to a certain corner -
J. L. Borges
Everything has been erasing time inside
and I’ve returned to the motionless south of the siesta.
You may sleep in the gloom
of high lime ceilings. I'm looking for you
in the timeless heat of the afternoon
while the old spring dies of thirst
and the balconies spew geraniums.
I came because the nights were full
of a crazy sun poured down the streets,
Because I heard again the horses’ headgear
moving aimlessly inside my chest
Everything has been erased inside.
I came to die.
I knock on your door.
Irene Sánchez Carrón
AMBIGUITY
The line is delicate
and very wayward
I’m afraid to tread on it,
don’t know which side I’m on;
feel pleasure and danger
I elaborate my surroundings,
invent the days
and settle myself
to my given task.
I’m going to tread on it,
break it,
one of these days.
Ana Milena Puerta
DANGERS II
I want only
to fall down in the deep
and beautiful dream
of the dead.
To rest.
But skin and bone
allow no truces
for their warriors.
Ana Milena Puerta
FIRST SONG OF THE SEA
I am a maker of nets.
Tying threads
I free knots
trapping fish
I discover the sea.
My fabric
comes and goes in the water
pursuing the smudge of scales
scratching in the algae
assuming salt
and its corrosive affront.
Until the sun sets
I untie
clean
and make a new net.
Ana Milena Puerta
TRUE
In your faulty memory
I repeat myself
unrecognised.
I am all times,
the promised land
where you every day
begin in me another kingdom.
Thus the real love;
the real oblivion.
Ana Milena Puerta
IN SYMPATHY
Then
I will invent swallows
to illuminate this Sun
that grieves us so.
But be under no illusion
that I create birds
or guard suns;
I merely share your sorrow
and wait the night.
Ana Milena Puerta
METAMORPHOSIS II
Suddenly a snap
and my kite collapsed
onto the meadow.
So ended childhood.
Ana Milena Puerta
SPELLING THE WATER
The stones
modulate
the vowels
of the river.
Ana Milena Puerta
THERE ARE MEN WHO WILL NEVER LEAVE
There are men who will never leave
you’ve seen it in their eyes
since you remember those eyes
years after they’ve gone.
They can be distant,
can appear at midnight
(if they’ve died),
can treat life as a game.
But always with the desolation of their absence
one understands their life was not in vain
and that their hope
is the only hope worthy of being alive.
And the men who will never leave
are not usually in the news
or talked of on the radio,
nor do they gesture on a screen:
unimportant people, who don’t circulate
in rarefied atmospheres
… they are those
who accepted suffering
and made it theirs for the salvation of other men
without uttering a word:
but they did so, eyes wide open
that we never forget them when they’re gone.
Miguel Arteche
THE GIRL OF DARKNESS
To my dead sister
The girl of darkness,
the girl who has her face in the twilight
of shaded gardens:
where it rains and no one knows
or knows only what the girl moves there
half of her face
half of her eyes
……… that girl
of darkness,
her face blown,
the bloodied face she spills
on the flowers: the girl who calls me
above the rain that will not fall,
in her lost half,
in the shaded gardens of the earth.
Miguel Arteche
LAST SPRING
The light was going down from the hill.
The sound of a train, a step that I’ve lost.
Youth, wound from another time,
you move away, sleepy
as a green lamp buried in the night...
It was near to me ,
in an undertone. The rain
was seeping through the perfumed ceilings.
Youth, you lost your ancient bell,
Your magic helmet,
Your transparent rod.
This one is my room. This one your flame.
This one is the garment. This one your waist.
" Your name ", you said, " has got lost in the shade.
Look for it farther, behind the hills ".
It was she of whom I was singing.
Nobody has to satisfy our lost meeting.
I got lost in the forest. You went
another way, toward the canals.
The light was going down from the hill.
Miguel Arteche
THE INNER ORBIT
In the centre of the sacred precinct,
the genius,
imprisoned in the orbit of himself,
lost in the night of the times,
insisted on searching for the theory
of the abysses, liquid, immense,
in the bewildering layers
of the intimate nature
of his ego.
Sergio Esteban Velez
BEYOND THE GUITAR
For Victor Jara
Beyond the guitar
the hands are separated from the motherland
a sound of wings that burns
and consumes my shoes
an invitation to urinate on the land
with the pure seed of song
Beyond the guitar
the blood draws a violent music
and the head of the singer fills with holes
and kisses that smell of death
Beyond the guitar
the roads cry
the rain weeps and falls to its knees
because the son of the land
will not complete his steps
Beyond the guitar
beyond the burst
that shut down hearts
beyond this poem
and with the unforgettable wound
of an unforgettable time
the eyes look for Victor beyond
the guitar
and the motherland
Mario Meléndez
MEMORIES OF THE FUTURE
This morning my sister woke me
at an unearthly hour
and said ‘Get up, you have to see this,
the sea has filled with stars.’
Astonished by this revelation
I pulled on my clothes and thought
‘If the sea has filled with stars
I must catch the first plane
and gather all the fish of the sky.’
Mario Meléndez
MY VOICE STRIPPED BARE
My voice stripped bare, I rejoice in the corollas;
this unique hour is an advent
and hope a crossroads.
Cristina Castello
SOIF
Soif – thirst, momentarily quenched,
moment of my unquenchable thirst.
Blessed persistence, the instant’s eternity.
Cristina Castello
WHEN THE WORD IS THE SEED
When the word is the seed
breath of the Absolute
celebration of wings
germ of light
What do we plant
in the heart of man?
Cristina Castello
RAINDROP
A drop of rain was trembling on the vine.
It hung all night in this damp shade
that suddenly
lit up the moon.
José Emilio Pachero
I DON’T WANT HIM HERE
I don’t want him here,
my guardian angel
who doesn’t understand
that conceiving haloes
is not my vocation.
The angel asks for love
then censures it.
He requires a celestial passion
proper only to his own kind.
My human state
does not permit the idea
of indulgence and repentance;
how sad to suffer in penance
for a moment’s joy. I prefer
the doctrine of the fauns who light
their bonfires in the forest
and dance and sing and breathe.
Maliyel Beverido
SWEET SNOW IS FALLING
Sweet snow is falling
behind everything, every lover,
a sweet snowfall comprising
what life has in the distance.
A slow diamond monologue
silent behind what I say,
an actor fluffing his lines
endlessly gesturing alone.
Fina Garcia Marruz
DECISION
I did not decide to love you
with mind or heart.
It was cold and winter.
Koldo Fierro
THEY SAY
They say a good bath
erases everything.
I’ve bathed myself for years
rubbed myself
scrubbed my skin red
and never could tear away
your hands.
Lucía Rivadeneyra
WRITTEN IN THE SIDE OF A TREE
I can’t remember if the tree
gave fruit or shade,
only that it harboured birds
that it was the centre of the courtyard
the heart of infancy
that in the soft wood
I carved your name on an arrowed heart.
And I remember no more
your name so raised with the tree’s growth
that you escaped with the first crop
taken by the birds.
Miguel Méndez Camacho
YOUR NAME
Born of me, of my shadow,
daybreak for my skin,
dawn of somnolent light.
Brave dove your name,
shy on my shoulder.
Octavio Paz
ATTIC
Attic, dark page, region
of falling darknesses, place in me
so deep, secret geography
whose outlines haven't yet emerged.
Place in me which knows
the living clarity of numbers.
sole place for me,
where all shapes dissolve,
where all landscapes
are already an ultimate landscape,
and all the cities
and doubled lovingly
equal with pages of silk and smoke.
Attic in me, in this desolate
architecture of a dream where flesh
could become a poem.
Pedro Gonzalez Moreno
BESTIARY
Caiman
He is the river captain ;
old sleepy fox, old Neptune,
with this timeless grief
of those who were saved from the Flood
On the innocent bank
the captain lifts his opened mouth
as if out pouring towards the skies
the souls of those he has devoured:
old fox, godfather, pal of the philosopher,
suspect, as the spine of a book ...!
Electric Eel
Fireball between two waters, storm-gout,
water cat - the soul of some sunken cat-
or rather a beam that fell one night
and as it neared the bottom,
was astonished by the cold.
Carib
The ten-millionth part
of a shark
multiplied ten million times.
The carib is the shortest distance
there is from the River to Death.
Boa
Tail in the tree, mouth in the river,
it is the whole riverbed:
it enters the Orinoco, the living waterfall,
tributary of meat.
Monkey
From the highest tree, where the sky touches itself,
hung from the tail to the peak of a star,
with outstretched hands, Grandfather greets us
Andrés Eloy Blanco
CHOIR OF THE PROVNCES
With the violence of harmony, in hungover tones
comes the choir of seven provinces,
seven adolescent faces
in the seven windows
of the stars of Autonomy.
They sing. He sings with them
the childhood of the Motherland
revealed on the lips with mother’s milk,
beneath the stars, the first, fair-haired,
who stitches in the cornfields the spiked button;
he dances to the choir of the provinces
in the classroom of the republic.
But they dance on the blue
herb of fantasy,
on Miranda's sky perforated by masts
above the navigating fleet.
No Guianese word is in the choir of seven nymphs,
in their song they turn inside out the way of the sky
and towards the East they sail as the seven sea-bass;
and there they see the miracle of the Earth,
On one side, a band of virgin gold its, yellow glowing north
elsewhere, pampas of the east, red of re-conquest
and halfway, a blue river
and there they meet, are multiplied, and sheltered in the centre
and so it was, like the river, its band of sky
presiding at the dance of seven the provinces.
Andrés Eloy Blanco
BRIDGE
Far off?
An arch extends
guiding the arrow
of your voice.
High?
There is a wing that steers
straight ahead, toward the sun.
from pole to pole
to a secret knowledge.
What else?
To be alert
for the hard rowing
and the soul complete,
wide open.
Nicolás Guillen
THE GRANDFATHER
This angelic woman with northern eyes,
lives attentive to the pulse of her European blood,
unknowing that in the depth of this rhythm
an African rhythm beats on the hard skin of hoarse side-drums.
Under the terse line of her sharp nose,
the mouth, in thin outline, traces a brief strip;
and there is no raven to stain the geography of snow
of her flesh, glistening tremulous and naked.
Ah, lady! Look at these mysterious veins;
what rows in that vivid water flowing within
and see passing, irises, huge lilies, roses, lotuses;
already you can see, anxious, close to the fresh shore
the sweet dark shade of the vanishing grandfather:
the one who always curled your yellow hair.
Nicolás Guillen
CLOSING MY EYES
I flee the evil that grieves me
looking for the good I lack.
More than sorrow, the hurt
that I still have hopes.
Tempests of desires break
in waves against the walls
of the dawn. I am blinded
by the riots they raise.
Nest in the sea. Cradle afloat.
The flower that struggles in the water
carries me out to sea
then casts me off.
I close my eyes and look
at her inner song.
Manuel Altolaguirre
RECOLLECTION OF AN OBLIVION
The doors were larger.
I grown gigantic, inside me
the recollection of my oblivion,
was crossing the rooms, striking the deaf walls.
Inside my throat, an inner necklace
of such germinal words,
laments that wouldn’t come out,
blocked as if by a great crowd.
So long a time of incomprehensible oblivion!
She always on her window
her window between two clouds
she and it always.
And I, distant, gigantic, mad,
with the recollection of my oblivion inside,
weighing in the soul its shipwreck,
fighting, sinking, in a sea of grey skies.
Manuel Altolaguirre
HYPOCRISY
Today I have dressed in finery.
I have placed on my body
clothes of clear silk.
Today I have dressed in finery,
because I wish that people
see with their fine faces
what my mind doesn't carry.
Today I have dressed in finery
to keep from their eyes
the bird of my soul.
Carmela Garcia Nieto
DE VIA BEATA
In an old inefficient country
not unlike Spain between two civil wars
in a town by the sea,
to own a house, a small farm
and no memory. Not to read,
nor suffer; not to write, nor pay a bill,
and live like a ruined nobleman
among the debris of my intellect.
Jaime Gil de Biedma
ELEGY AND REMEMBRANCE OF A FRENCH SONG
(Elegía y Recuerdo de la Canción Francesa)
You remember: Europe was in ruins.
A whole world of images remains from that time
discoloured, hurting my eyes
with the debris of bombings.
In Spain people crowded into cinemas
and there was no heating.
It was peace -after so much blood-
that arrived ragged, as we knew it
for five years.
And a whole impoverished continent,
eaten away by history and the black market,
was suddenly more familiar to us.
Imprints of post-war Europe!
that seem wet in silent rain,
grey cities where a train arrives
dirty with refugees: how many objects
from our coming story you brought, awakening
hope in Spain, and fear!
Even the air of that time seemed
held in suspense, as if asking,
and in the old neighborhood taverns
the defeated spoke in low voices ...
We, the youngest, as always expected
something definitive and sweeping.
And it was at that moment, precisely
in those moments of fear and hope
-so unreal, yes- that you appeared,
oh rose of the sordid, stained
creation of men, surly, vile and beautiful
French song of my youth!
You were the unexpected that imposes itself
on the imagination, because that's how life is,
you who sang rogue heroism,
the outbreak of rebellions
like flames, and the fear of sleeping alone,
the intensity that afflicts the heart.
How quickly we all loved you!
In your world of nights, with the boy and the girl
standing entwined in a dark doorway,
in the muted sound of your melodies,
an echo of ourselves echoed, exalting us
with the nostalgia of rebellion.
And still, in the high night, alone,
with glass in hand, when I think of my life,
once again sans faire du bruit your musics
ring in the memory, like a farewell:
It seems like it was yesterday yet something has changed.
Today we don't expect the revolution.
Rickety post-war Europe
With the moon peeking through the broken windows
Europe before the German miracle,
picture of my life, melancholic!
We, of those days are not the same,
though sometimes a song still captures us.
Jaime Gil de Biedma
LOVE MORE POWERFUL THAN LIFE
(Amor más poderoso que la vida)
The same quality as the sun in your country,
coming out from the clouds:
cheerful and delicate shade in some leaves,
glare of a crystal, modulation
from the dull glow of the rain.
The same quality as your city,
your innumerable crystal city
identical and different, changed by time:
streets that I do not know, and an old square
populated with birds,
the square where we kissed one night.
The same quality as your expression,
after these years,
tonight when looking at me:
the same quality as your expression
and the wounded look on your lips.
Love that has the quality of life,
love with no requirement for the future,
present, past,
love more powerful than life:
lost and found.
Found, lost ...
Jaime Gil de Biedma
CATALAN
APOCALYPSE
(Apocalipsi)
The bones, in the mud, have built the palaces
and now the blood crackles as night nears dawn.
Everything is possible in these lonely rooms.
The wind will spread the impalpable ashes
the curtains of gold and damask have fallen.
The assassins approach with their heralds of smoke
and the long trumpets proclaiming death.
Joan Perucho
FIRST LETTER WRITTEN IN THE EVENING
(Primera Lletra Escrita al Capvespre)
Small meadows under an intact and glistening sky
furrowed by coloured globes, solid gold words,
sighs of exhausted fronds, images of deceased people
lost forever in this still air.
No, it hasn't been like this all my life: in those days,
frequently distant and very discreet, the lady
in turquoise crocheted in the shade,
and Louis, my cousin, dressed as a sailor, ran
behind the bike of my dream, falling often.
That was about the year nineteen thirty,
the aroma of things was different, and an orange had
the taste of sun. I know perfectly well what it is like to be a man.
But I remember the walk that led to the mysterious country,
the illnesses, the jewel, hidden treasure, yellow pen,
the cries, the innocent air of my land of marvels,
fabulous, unknown, remote, forever lost.
Joan Perucho
ETERNITY
(Eternitat)
To Ramon Monterde
I always feel absent, friend, the outbreak
of your pain accompanies me as a secret companion.
With an obscure agreement, the time of your silences
stretches out, kissing the sacred hand of my dead.
I measure the ocean of time by your hymns,
the deep sea of old memories always present.
A pure fabric of light surrounds you and everything
becomes eternity, nothing but eternity.
Jordi Vives i Batlle
FAN
(Ventall)
Behind the immobile fan of the night
you look at me and don't know me, the slave of your forgetfulness.
You look at my memories and you feel me because you don't feel me:
I am the breath of death that freezes your thoughts!
Jordi Vives i Batlle
I WILL LIVE
(Si em vaga...)
I will live, if I still live,
surviving a remote song.
I will live with the eyebrow furrowed
against wrath, against mud.
I will live standing up like a judge,
just looking, not saying a word,
like the wall in its cellar,
like a stone in its slot.
Josep Carner
THE DARK HOUR
(A Hora Foscant)
It's late, the roads no longer tempt me.-
And I know you, from the orchard inside the fence,
fallen, trampled in the fog,
oh days, oh leaves, oh flowers!
More steps becoming furtive
as of an indecisive stranger.
Spectres of dahlias sigh
in the middle of the weeping darkness.
In the distance swims a sound of bells
which gathers the living with the fallen.
Invincible night spreads,
a sea of isands that are loneliness,
that call to me of the light on the table
and some flying thought,
the old damaged chair
and a sheet of disillusioned paper.
Josep Carner
THE END
(Fi)
Comes the end of everything,
long-feared misfortune.
The runner takes it
with a kind of moan,
the look, a point of darkness,
the kiss, a little cold;
the look, a point of darkness
and love, a thread of wind.
Josep Carner