Rome was already that sound before my childhood tongue learned to name things. The Tiber carries the colour of memory, Campo de’ Fiori burns in bronze and dinner drifts down from Trastevere windows, mingling bells with the blare of car horns. The city entered my voice before my eyes had seen it: in the wet
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Here, at the heart of the Meseta, the sea is only an invention of the sky. And yet all it takes is a half-closed shutter, the white silence of the controra, for something to call me again. The land slopes down towards the coast. I see again whitewashed walls, the violet shadow of bougainvillea, dry
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(English translation by Pina Piccolo) I walk along cobbled streets shrouded in ordinary ramblings, you appear there on the ledge of the sky hanging like a star about to fall, your evanescent face trembling and screaming as you sway like tall trees in early winter winds. To many, you are just some crazy fool a
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I trimmed your hedge at the cemetery with the practicality that unites us, then I stopped by dad’s pruning shears in my bag. Rosemary has invaded his flowerbed and my nostrils. I took home the scent of his words that resonated like a prophecy, years later confirmed by events. I am the result of a
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I crossed the mountains of Albania, so long desired, with sweet nostalgia, from the farther shore of Otranto’s sea, when I went seeking the sirens’ melody. The royal eagle of the Balkans wreathed my head in laurel bright, and for one evening I was queen of the night. A gentle white mongrel, quiet and tame,
Trade in oil and wine across Mare Nostrum, when the voices of Phoenician merchants sang the powers of murex purple. The hourglass has devoured the millennia. Seagulls sweep overhead from Rhodes to Tirana, the tarantella rebounds from Otranto to Istanbul. I catch the same winds of war, the trafficking of people, misery, hunger.
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We suddenly inhabit this space setle on cardboard mountains and in the corner of a huge box we arrange the objects, the things from another space, from another life and start for a new discovery of the objects. They live differently here. They intrude they buy shares for the new order in the life
There is one there is one very very much a man – As if he were all of humaniy! As if he were a living God! There is one man Who is more than man in a man: Distilled philanthropy! Twice refined beauty! He gives you the warmth Of his soul to warm
(For Hristo Poljanski) To this small (and cold) age We gave our warmth – We warmed it with sweet words And cared about its growth… To his small (and muddy) age We gave our clarity – Carried by its sweet flow We interpreted it briskly… To this small (and cursed) age We
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I wonder what Brahma does sitting cross-legged in his day which lasts three and a half millennia. I sometimes see him in my dreams leaning on his elbows over the clouds’ quietude. Under it a lotus’ blossom opens like a universe, the Ganges smoothes the flint-stones, singing hymns to the fire. Still shines that
