TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN BY MARIE ORTON
In the Hands the Moon
1-Creation
I take the sunlight
and a handful of grass
and some water
I give shape to your face
moon…
I contemplate it for a long time
And I pass it in my body
between the arteries…
Your foreign face
is always sad.
Your lonely face
is far away, not seeing me.
Your face – the moon –
in my memory shatters….
2-Nostalgia
I see you far away
A rose clothed in the morning
a flame of nostalgia.
Foreign moon
you stretch out in the bosom of the clouds…
I do not know the color of reproach
I do not understand the syllables of tears
Swift as the mirage
across the desert of time…
Night has the smell of ashes.
Memories have the shape of fire:
Clothes
Letters
Images…
The sky is far away.
Like chasm in the sea
It swallows the moon…
3- Past
The moon from my eyes removes the last veil.
In my hands the moon performs the rite of extinction.
Moon,
It was . . .
4- Silence
No one knows,
Your eyes have the voice of the sea,
the color of the waves.
There is no wind in the desert
that restores the sand to the dunes of your bosom.
There is no shadow of trees
That returns the birds to your hands.
No one knows,
your lips are the loneliness of winter,
the taste of snow.
There is no fire in the naked body
that returns to the mirror of memory
a moon veiled
by the silence of the galaxy…
No one knows.
Turin
27 August, 1999
* Excerpted from “Nelle mani la luna” poesie, Ananke, 2001
The Emigrant
A man wanders within himself,
Wanders in the squalor of the streets.
A man bewildered,
a man present a man absent,
carries the pain in his heart like a burning volcano
and on his eyelids he bears nostalgia.
An absent man,
a present man,
sheds his patience,
draws it out on the night streets and there he falls asleep.
Long is the impossible dream,
and far is the awaited homeland.
City of fog and fear.
That man was a dream.
Hunger is deep wound
and bleeding that rends itself the vision,
and in the scream of death.
That was the village of his longing,
where moons flower into images
and women transform into flickers of love and pain.
The nights of that village become the ardor of longing,
become the scent of the beloved for the emigrant.
And if his heart is fire,
that of the town is stone and ice.
A man outside that wall stands alone,
watching the star of his exile and his memories:
horses of clouds.
Perhaps he has a daughter, or a child with sand-colored skin.
Near that mirage, he tends the prayer of return, to wait, in sorrow and silence, for the birds of
autumn.
A man, on that sidewalk, beside that convoy,
wanders searching for the sunlight and his yearned-for homeland.
A man, among us, goes searching for love,
his identity, his memory.
*Excerpted from the novel La sponda oltre l’inferno [The Shore Beyond Hell] Oligo, 2021 p.
267.
The Silence of Nothingness
In the deafening silence of nothingness
I listen to the voice of the sea,
in agitation,
and I weep
a love so distant.
In a dense night,
slowly exhales
the scent of death,
among the roses of the sky
Strange.
Your face calls to me
beyond the waves
and shatters.
Painful.
The light of life
in the cave of the mind,
goes out.
In vain.
* Excerpted from “Nelle mani la luna” poesie, Ananke, 2001
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