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 sampietrini,
in the iron of the shutters,
in the water of the nasoni
drunk from cupped hands in summer.
Then I left,
changing windows and accents.
I learned to live inside another alphabet,
to reach for a word
and hear another come first.
That is where Rome returns:
sometimes only in a sound,
in a cadence I thought was lost,
in a word spoken without thinking.
The world has taught me other roads,
other voices, other names.
And yet Rome is in me
and every so often resurfaces
without my calling it.