TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN BY PATRICK WILLIAMSON

This passing of days around life
a childhood game
a feather dance among the whirlwinds.
One more wrinkle on the world and you laugh.
The white-haired trees, their thick roots.
And you move like the first step
you still listen to the rain falling on leaves,
the sky and its music.

***

Measure, what a massive claim.
You state the distance as if you could calculate
the digit that contains you.
An infinite number raised to the power of speaking:
this runs through your veins and counts the steps,
verse after verse.
The rhythm of breathing belongs to you,
a moment is a century.
And you still do not learn how big
the temporal bone is.

***

Search inside, in the white of bones
in the silence they release as they stretch.
In the surface of the skull, the vault of heaven,
the apex of the sacrum.

***

Nothing to do when all is silent,
there is nothing to do but listen.
The voice of air and heaven
the bud and its obstinacy,
the stem that rises, straight
like a spinal column,
and then the pollen, aerial love
that zigzagging travels.
Everything here is a feeling,
even the word kneels down
apologises for trying to tell it all.

***
One day you enter time and you are.
On that day, not another, you become.
In the depths of flesh you learn the sound of water.
You come from the liquid of your father.
You come into your mother’s liquid.
You listen to them. They listen to you move.
You do not know you are seen even before you enter the light.
You have the patience of the wise.
You form yourself according to nature, without haste,
bone by bone: human tissue in evolution.
How many eras have you already completed?
Everyone chooses a name for you.
They do not know that you know the languages of the world.

Also, read “Between Longings for what was and the Epiphanies of the Beyond: A Review of Hélène Cardona’s Life in Suspension” by Hiranya Mukherjee published in The Antonym:

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