“Languages have no borders, borders are only political” “There is an invisible language we all draw on” “All writing is a translation of a world” “I move through the languages I know looking for a universal language.” This is the true avant-garde, the true
prophecy for the future of the species.
Fekrì, hubùn, dashùri
sirèl, bhālabāsā, agàpi
uthàndo, ài, jeclahày
süyüü, obichàm, aròha
lyubòv', hkyithkyinnmayttàr
khairtài, cariàd, upéndo
amour, is bràe, snēhàṁ
maxabbàt, szerelém, rudo,
ādaràya, fitiavàna
liebe, evîn, miq’vàrs.
Go on in verses of seven clear syllables
with these sounds, new as the world
that call out now from meadows
and from forests, igloos, huts
and stilt houses, skyscrapers and canoes: I, this bit of nothing
slipped into the dream of matter, will care for you
until the end of the world.
Rome, February 9, 2019 - traduzione di Johanna Bishop
POEM-SHROUD FOR GENOA
august 14, 2018
A shroud is called sudario, sweat cloth
because it absorbs what seeps out
of the dead. It is draped
over the face, to screen the living from the sight
of death’s patient scouring
of those beloved features, the swelling
and the final excavation, the paring down to bone, that brings
a body’s concluded matter back to the unfinished state of other
matter, to the jumbledness of mudclods and quasars.
Out of decency a shroud is draped
over the face, to stop that face from ending
up before our eyes. Just so I wish
that words, which cannot really wipe away
even one drop
of your blood, might bear witness at least to
life, the deep sky blue
or the dog-rose between the boat hoists
that made you smile
at how it was so doggedly alive
within the endless workyard of the port
aglow with dying sun
or that other sun, the radial grandeur of dawn
raised amid flittings of reality like a renaissance.
Contemporary world going to your death
among the seagulls on the city fringes,
under a Milky Way wheeling like the green insomnia
of a universe
that isn’t watching us, you world of infinite existencing that
does not contemplate
mortal creatures, without first name or last we will turn back into things
like other things, without wrappings or nostalgia we will return
to the unsorted heap of stars. But now, now
that we are alive
traduzione di Johanna Bishop
da The Disappeared (pordenonelegge, 2016)
Mosses Pave the Way for Spring
It was dark that evening – darkness being rather sluggish and tranquil – and from it emerged an old woman wearing a shawl and a long black skirt. She said if you want to save your little girl, let her fast days and nights; you can only speak of the distance between here and Paradise. All that’s left of the woman is the slip of the tongue between my daughter and my life.
my dear heart is a human god, a bird from the highlands
nesting night after night in the pale glow of your breast like a perfect hendecasyllable verse (soul-thing) white and so lavish, slight of wing – rose and bramble, ashes – parva among squandered stars, white blood
of a tube sponge in the white planetarium, white tiger sitting by the side of the white painless road
my dear heart grows from your bones like a rose from a living tongue – in drips, in a hemorrhage – from your alphabet beyond picturing
but it is from this body, from its silent harvest that the word comes, this absolute bread I offer, this beauty so vivid, made for you
6.6.13
x – metamorphosis I have saddled my mount, the disc of the sun rings out like bronze over the countryside, inspired by a magnificent ram – transhumance, time out of time a chorus of corollas unfurls at dawn, your flower-eye cracks open, lets its gaze settle into the golden vein of the earth, into the world’s joy at being alive, trodden by beasts at pasture, which are living up to life really I... as your whole body worshipped, said yes as the bronze of your eyes worshipped, said yes breach-bloom of wisteria appearing out of the bitterness of iron make her happy, black thorn of wild robinia make her happy, make her happy, field of mallow, spread out like a laud under the blue calm of the mountain: I serve the animal that worships the sun * take care of her, I was told. yes, said I. love her, I was told. yes, said I. never leave her alone, because through your love she loves herself. and I, could no longer answer imaginary letter where I was flesh she was ivory (Pier Paolo Pasolini) dawn of tender flesh, caught in the exoskeleton of the Law in the tragic month of November everything was weeping hold me tight, outside of human bounds hold me like a mother in her dreamed embrace 12.22.13
forever forever forever...
I wish you would put on that dress you bought on a day in July after saying I love you too
I wish you would put on that dress for me, one last time,
then, I wish I could melt into the earth and rest where she rests
8.1.14
the nightingale a nightingale was here. it shouldn’t have been here, but it was here. and sang so long. I made my little silent song and he made his. who knows who he was singing for, maybe just for the sweetness of singing. no purpose, no victory. with life living up to his song. that’s it, sweet Alba, I want life to live up to the song. that’s the trouble and that is the good thing. I dressed you all up in my song of love I raised you all up, like March grass piercing through the winter earth, like the bray of a jenny among the fuller’s teasels, the yellow wing bar of birds in the sky. your life answered. your body answered my song. then, it went back within the bounds. but the nightingale, out of time and out of his warm African land, here, from the heart of the western winter sings, sings on, sings 1.4.14
garden of original joy
your flesh blossoming like a flame in the green flame of the country I don’t believe my eyes
I see the golden bronze of your body coming closer I don’t believe my eyes
you pull volatile gold out of your chest that can feel love and you tell me between kisses it’s a miracle I don’t believe my eyes
all the grass and the whole scent of the countryside are awe
this bread left in the grass is awe and awe is the bottle foaming over the flowers
don’t wipe your mouth your beauty has no barriers
my blood contains space without dominion, and from the center of all life spills an embrace big as the world
I already told you back in the city, remember? look, the world is so big, it’s your love that has made room for itself
half-naked, towel over your shoulder you walk with flesh reborn out of my kisses
with the feet of a child you climb the stairs, you climb up to feel where the soul of a living creature begins
in the crucial place there is a vast silence and a buzzing of mosquitos the gold of your lips the white fluttering of your blood
out of the beloved body rises a glow that pours out, your whole body making a sound of sea how your heart beats and in my blood the same light shines
now and then we laugh at my anguish that no bigger words exist
if I could open my chest, remember?
I can make up the words I can make up the whole world to make you happy
then, I let you go like you wanted
don’t go, I said, I miss what I am with you, this ample thing, this sun-filled space that becomes what’s good for you
it wasn’t the muscle alone that suffered, the whole area around it ached and the silence scraped like a rasp and completed the spontaneous work of pain
which echo, what moon, what soil, what crater, which among the high stars of the night that lit up your mouth still happy with love, what pitying planet was moved to compassion? what was merciful?
your ancestral body has released its astral body
dawn hovering over mortal things when they awake as if they did not have to die this is what i know of love: the wounds that take years to turn back into flesh that still wants to be blessed with kisses, never leave her alone
9.7.14
Union of MRK 1034
the spirals of the two ammonites on your chest
echo the shape of the twin galaxies PGC 9074 and PGC 9071 in the constellation of the Triangle
one of them (9074, type Sa) shows a bright protrusion, the inkling of a dawn, but has its arms tightly wrapped around its own nucleus
the other, the galaxy that unfurls to the north in the sidereal dark (9071, type Sb) has stretched its arms more than a few light-years out.
the black space of the universe is moved by incommensurable magnetisms. otherwise, it’s blind. this sort of uninhabited embrace, this guardian opening its wings in the deep silence, bears an ache in its right shoulder. a celestial object with inflamed tendons, in your northeastern sky
the two galaxies are scientifically inseparable. I quote, from an article by Eleonora Ferroni, in the newsletter of the National Institute of Astrophysics: “they are close enough to feel each other’s gravity, but there are no visible gravitational disturbances"
both have produced “young, hot stars lying behind,” while “older, cooler star formations” pulse, gold like the feral gold of the savanna, close to their nucleus
and a chorus of receding stars surrounds them, like a coronet of debris
the two astral neighbor ladies have left trails of blood and sweetness, the dross of lives long absorbed by the thundering of galactic winds. but the gravitational pull of each to the other will lead them to converge into a single great phenomenon, into a full embrace.
the article closes saying: “in several hundred million years the two structures will merge, since the gravitational attraction that already binds them will have definitively drawn together the already inseparable twins”.
patient holy stars. objects that do not force
the spacetime curve, limpid forces that remain in the natural interval that on earth is called respect. the stars have the calm of stars..
this Cretaceous fossil form has an earthly design: its spirals, formed by thick strokes of organic ink, depict the rotation of the two galaxies. things that perhaps took place on the same time in earth and in heaven. 180 million years ago. things of which we are the future. or the utopia.
this science-fiction union of set theory, the fossil/astral stage of matter, is my gift to you.
waiting to form the union to which they are destined, the two neighbors carry out intense inner activities which lead both to give off active energy, useful for creating planets. they are two splendid foundries, two feverish mills of stars. they radiate light.
the online observatory of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, which identified them, published the news on 06.24.2013 (from that afternoon, I recall a gleeful arm-wrestling match at the café, under a wall of wisteria blossoms. nobody won. our forces are equivalent and complex structures)
the evocative discovery instantly spread through international astronomy sites, in the early days of July 2013. From those days I remember a dialogue about the irony of nature: we discovered that the alveoli in the lungs and meconium in the gut form at the same evolutionary stage of the human fetus: pneuma and feces. as always. humanity.
then, I remember a song of immortal love on the ruins of the Basilica Maxentius: “e si ’na stella canta pe’ ammore rimmane ’n cielo mill’anne e nun more”. then, I remember a smile, deep enough to absolve the dead, invincible as the gravitational force that on earth is called destiny. and then I remember a ringing of bells, simple as the warmth of your mouth
that lingers on here, well beyond my life
16.11.14
Plea for the release of Alba
Herein we relate the sorrowful and joyful matter of the body of Alba, confiscated in the month of August of this year by its legitimate Proprietress, whom for the sake of brevity,
we shall refer to hereinafter as
the consonant P1.
And now the calamitous events are laid out in clearest succession.
In the month of May of this year, the undersigned Procuratress of Alba – whom we shall refer to hereinafter,
for the pleasure of nullity,
as the consonant P2 – had come across the body in question
in the lobby of an Institute. The body was of the female gender, it was still
breathing,
it was to all appearances alive and quite
beautiful
It was however in a state of dire need. It showed evident scars, as if due to a strain or a SOLITUDE long borne. These signs were especially visible along the right cheek and at the root of the neck. It also possessed an unknown number of rays abandoned by its sides,
extinguished
almost to the root.
But in it there lived on a proud nostalgia, a stubborn melancholy determined to endure, perhaps the memory, not altogether faded, of when
it was
fully alive.
Mysteriously, P2’s eyes envisioned in a flash the power that THE BODY would develop, if properly restored.
And,
just as mysteriously, through a fluke of
nature that many admit to considering a miracle,
in P2 there existed a transitive need to heal,
equivalent to that of the body in question.
The body
was therefore immediately reawakened by the desire to heal P2.
The body
and its undersigned Procuratress found in each other such a mysteriously intimate and familiar meaning that they felt a tenderness deeper than either would ever have been capable of feeling for herself.
Similar to hers, yet outside of hers, the body appeared to P2 naturally worthy of every form of loving attention. To this emotion P2 soon added a commitment to this emotion. So she gave herself over. Then came the days of patience and primary devotion. P2 applied herself to tending that body with infinite loving care: she nourished it, made it laugh and walk and even held it in her arms, she kept it animal company, overcoming bit by bit its mistrust of rebirth. And the body was generous and gave proficient satisfaction. Slowly, the deactivated receptors were rekindled, everything inside set to smiling with joy: bashfully at first, almost shielding itself. To start with the mouth was fed and, through it, joy poured out all over the body, like pure water slowly washing away encrustations and debris, false resting places of phantom limbs, empty forebodings and tracks of salt left by ancient tears. The joy rinsed everything from inside, sweeping away wraiths and painful memories through channels that had silted up over time, from disinterest and neglect. P2 felt the slow joy of witnessing the awakening of faculties and appetites.
When the body was all clean and all new, right in the middle of a memorable
wide-open
day,
out of it arose a shining and fearless identity, which was immediately called Alba.
For P2 it was an incomparable joy to witness that birth, see the rays spreading out one by one around the body, luxuriant and happy, seeing the body put into action the never-more-forgotten mechanism of love. As this all of this took place in the body, the same took place in P2. Through the love of that body P2 experienced the brief experience of loving herself.
This lasted two days, since with eyes cleansed from inside, the body found the strength to see the melancholy of its other present: indeed, the body endured the daily strain of shining over an abandoned realm.
And so, on a torrid afternoon in mid-August, the body, considered too painfully
KEEN OF SIGHT,
was confiscated by its legitimate Proprietress and shut up
in a cramped cubbyhole, where the aforesaid body had no
air or
light
and meekly it began
to fade away, again
to be bent and hollowed in the
face.
It was also resolved not to allow the body itself to radiate anything whatsoever
especially in relation to the
Procuratress known as P2,
pending new instructions from the Proprietress known as P1.
The exertion of reining in the desire to shine under the loving hands of P2 exhausts the body. When she is allowed to approach the peephole of the cell,
the undersigned P2 can see its debilitated state.
Likewise the undersigned P2
allows herself to point out that the same thing is happening to
her.
Therefore, in hope of moving her to compassion and reappraisal, the undersigned Procuratress is herewith sending the esteemed Proprietress a formal plea for the release of Alba. The undersigned P2 declares herself prepared to pay Madame P1 the sum of 10,000 pure gold lines of verse and to imitate the call of every songbird and even undertakes to learn dances and jokes to assuage any future vexation of Madame P1. So that Alba may be restored to the unfathomable beauty of the
world.
from GARDEN OF JOY(in ELLE, performance by Sonia Bergamasco)
I wanted to write about joy the scent of your breath in the heart of summer the mere nip of your teeth right at the edge the moonlight casts the white glow of stars into the puddles * in the morning above all you blazed up in the light like water cast on embers your voice was naked as water * you let everything into the living dough of your body the vault full of stars and the muzzles of beasts echoed in your mother-yeast you were happy * look at me I am the path for the gold of galaxies I am bread set down at your feet after the first harvest of creation * I sing of the slight wind we do not feel that blows in the distance between stars I sing of our banner snapping in the thick of the Roman mint I sing of the leaf bed and the glossed shell of the water lily and I sing of the raw gold of your eyes simple and transparent as a yes * the simple shadow of the body in love the swaying pendants at the throat and the enamel of teeth sparkles, naked your tongue planting itself pale between dark lips * with hair as black as wheat, straining towards inflorescence like the agave, you stood so much taller than yourself, taller than your own life * we have mulched the earth with the salt of bodies the cinnabar of the sky mixed with the oil in the puddles and the gold of the light on your lip your body on the fluorescent grass of morning the bedroom flooded by a phloem of light and the vortex in the drapery, bright green over pale wood drink this gold that has no way to die
29 July 2014
traduzione di Johanna Bishop
da La macchina responsabile(Crocetti, 2007)
FROM THE EXPOSED WORLD
Love is the health of the monkey. The eyes of the saint donkey marked by seeing the quiet rust of the cisterns.
Wind that sharpens the grass, the ultraviolet chalice, of the evening as a radiant latitude.
Or the sea and the afternoons composed by the nymphal sheath of the cicada.
Prove me your happiness in the carcass of the everyday that you gnaw until there is light, light...
IN THE CRAWLING MONTH
The tremble in the lairs at sunrise assumes a new macerate majesty to look into the beauty of the trees in the sweet days of late October.
The primary ultrasound of the bells in the swoon’s hour spangled by luminous knots.
We are an extreme azure-blue race - new appearances erected towers receptions exploded towers that slowly collapse.
The precipice of a body in time, purged of houses in the imminence of a secular paradise. Inside monstrances of snow I found the faces of the soldiers, black hosts - scales - hearts of grubs, poor hearts soaked with matter. A dark ruminating under layers of snow.
THE WIND IN THE SEA IS A BEING MADE OF SCALES ARRANGED TO MASSACRE
The wind – a being of scales that assaults us, straightens the bares of the hill body harvested; a balance of placid verdigris, a lament, the scented mills of underground sources the firm peace of the auburn water, the victim of the heat that declares his love for enigmas and condition us.
The volatile rank of the cars of iron and flesh Is a breeding ground of latent returns water removed from the terrace and from the wheat fields drowned sanctuaries inebriated of wind and glory of the solstice bare and thundering observatory full of euphoria and chill.
FROM THE RAVINE OF BABI-YAR
But suddenly I wanted to live to live in the human infection. How? escaping if she remains here – but I went back erased in me erased in the specific human characteristic of laughing. They burned forced to watch newborn babies becoming ash (the own musculature and the other, the saliva and the breath of the others) and the salty smell of disheveled hair swept away by the burn. Look at the torch of his forehead where you laid down the other half of your kisses. So they could not separate the body of my brother from her arms as tight as she held it, I keep on thinking from which vice my salvation will come.
A sea of people and sorrow. Even the trees laid on the ground for the sorrow. In the phosphorous grey of the heap of stones two as compromised dummies. It was not the bullets of the drunken soldiers to kill ha ieled shelì, it was the weight of my hug under the weight of the bodies. And then the shots again. And the golden teeth were torn away from the mouth of the dead.
The glance of my mother was frightening – under her was a sea of bodies covered in the soul – I remained silent as black mud. What could emerge from the bottom of the ravine but this unhealable fault.
SAID BY SIMBOLS
The dear guide lost in country of Northern Europe. The language of the passer-bys is extremely strange. So I don’t mourn enough in the dream my mother: snow that I have never seen is her death and the house is flooded and incurable, the pots are no longer hers, they are others: not mine, therefore, because I’m the universal heir and the house is a great place full of strangers who enter the body that has not yet ended up between those shiny doors of pale blue glass, but hospitable only.
MAYBE IT WAS THE AGE, THE CIRCUMSTANCE
My hands are covered by white stains as the bark of the tree bent by a strange sadness.
It’s a pale blue round the radiance of the fourmotors on the void of the face placed like a stone with the rifle on its side, the body like a big seed cracked by the tree in the swallowing of the ground.
The position of the bodies interest us when they are no longer responsible: as we are grub fished out picked up with pieces of newspaper from the tracks – and the body regrets towering over at the mercy of cloudy elements with the rosary put in the pocket by the mothers on the earth fairly attached at the bone in intermittent contact with another big body and the sweet agony of not being human beings.
Don’t worry, take care of your money, forgive this earth with its language, with the happiness of an angel like a scale at the centre of the breast that nullifies the characteristics and the grass slides from the palms.
The body is at the same time springboard and rag of the invisible relationship of proportion between crime and punishment. It remains in memory of this sorrow between the excess of the woods the rapid meridian ellipsis of mineral magma with clasped hands. The shoes wax of the soldier marks the arsenal of nature it’s sadness that he bears, the desperate human load of this frightening and mute earth.
I DID NOT GO IN THE WATER WITH DIFFICULTY
The indifference of the mimosas similar to a project of the swallows and sea in the mullioned window of the under port – the steel of the containers at the beginning of the aerial bridge on bodies as the arch of the new moon. I felt alone at the most a man, so I wanted your body without resistance as the bread broken by Christ.
The milestone experience of the pines - the drills, the brooms at the base of the trellis isolated in the glass and covered by lime. The countryside that touches the sky and the sea as an infinite gratitude as your steps before the sin.
Inhale the air and the fading particles, for all eternity with explosion of light ammoniacal: the toxic mold of Tuthankamon, the egg shape of the skull filled with not resin, golden rings on the knees where the bone begins to react to the dorsal bend without ever resisting.
His voice was calm and truthful, a love shed the hemorrhagic reaction of a human material. The bones show sign of healing now they appear sick with gratitude.
traduzione di Barry Callaghan
FIVE MOTHERS
The lymph system of the dead is traced on roses the flames still corkscrewed around the cinch of nerves and flitting helixes of hair: Homeric poses of matter half-alive. Buried deep above the earth (chorus: the earth), if they have any mercy they will seem fallen into a simple-minded sleep like a huge repast of human flesh, they will seem to mingle in a dazed resignation (chorus:- their flesh - their gaze with the smoldering mud of Gernika)
Slumbering mud, a document left blank – objects devoid of boundaries with the ground.
Her whole self is a gorge of blood that sags from the mouth of her son (chorus: Son!), your name was the glory of my mouth, it sprang from the white gleam of incisors, at dusk it would go rolling through the arches each of its vowels like pearls scattered into the peace of dawn so that with the first breath of the morning a smile would bud up from my breast in saying you.
Her mouth was twisted open like the silence of a star. This is what you people have done. (chorus: this is what you people have done)
Like a bridal veil, the garland of larvae laid by flies on a head so utterly made for life that quivers in the wind mimicking the leaves like yellow traffic lights along Calle San Miguel.
And every body stoops down to the earth, every body bends just so towards them and thrusts – thrusts their arms down under the earth, with the pitiful swarm of the living. Come Rosa, come Pablo, Maria, Alejandro, Carmen, I see your white columns of meditation, I see your white dreams I see the bicycles the lanterns the framework of it all I remember and remember tomorrow, the date of your wedding, and the brazen ribbons like dragons’ tongues snapping and fluttering as the car carried you south: tomorrow. Hasta luego.
A forestgrown wood and your tongue is like a great sea creature too drained to fight the current. You linger like a maceration like a stain of the invisible in the calm disaster of this round world and among celestial muscles like a baited hook you dangle the acrobat’s rope, the green cable, the posthumous flamethrower of this earthbound tongue.
I thought it was his breath that came foaming out of his mouth, but maybe he was not at peace with his soul he was tattered from a stern reprimand of disenchantment like fire at the foot of the cross.
I see them smiling and saying come on Maria, come and get us, I hear all this rustling of children and feel the stab of knowing they aren’t home, I see them like ropes of fire or they caress my lashes wordless, for lack of themselves as language.
Do not tread on the face of my son for he has yet to know the world.
I was shrouded in the bleakness of a tree with no control over the splintering of its limbs, that never mends after the bloody pruning and does not move on. I feel it in my heart, so deeply stained with the raw wine of his body and know that from the cross of his body the birds will flit down one by one.
To me you are an angel and a rose. On earth hoed and contemplated with the phenomenal slowness of natural labour here are my first kisses from the shores of after.
traduzione di Johanna Bishop
THE EMPTY ISLAND
I – the sea
The Tyrrhenian is a cage of salt an infirm cadaver to trace with the impassive sleep of an animal.
The deformation of boulders broken loins of enormous fleeting phenomena on the coasts animals disposed toward calm.
The saints stood like cormorants - with their beaks tied to the joints of the sea they lead the way for caravans.
The watershed of the savories the inclined aviary of the mistral – withered one by one the tufts of the wings, just short of a forest of saline origin.
The Aeolian peace of the cliffs, widespread horns of war on top of the clay in peace and quiet like sanctuaries and mines of saline silver merchant ships in the bunker of the ploughing
II – the earth
An immense shroud on the bass drum of the sea where the inanimate operates and the sea flares up toward the unleavened white of the human herd that imitates the burning heat of seagulls and the flock
Cows the color of wheat in the melancholy sun – a wild field of the sweetest milk.
Beaches opened up by an age-old mourning, broken down on the earth not completed by the deserted tolling of the sun and full of bellows.
She can only be a saint because the island is empty the earth without sight without a candle of animals and in the globe of dawn vibrates the unhappy ax of the pulse down to the bone of the tree. A cross of silence bursts forth in the sacred choir - in the profit of extinct herbs that taste of craters
MARIA, THE APPARITIONS
I dream of them, they call me, I see them smiling at me and saying come Maria, come and get us, I feel all this movement of children and I feel bad that instead I am not at home, I see them at home like cords of fire with the fillings of the dead in the coagulations of blood or they caress my eyelashes mute, lacking themselves as language
TEN THOUSAND CIVILIANS (*)
I. Sant’Anna, August 12, 1944
We knew the young man with the cross pendant and the picture of a saint it was put ahead in the light like before closing your eyes after the descent of the sun that leaves the soil with grass and flesh frying and the beasts everywhere divided by hands still bolted to protect his face from the machine-gun and the person writhed in all the directions of the slaughter
They would round up children like grains of sand and like sand that obeys the wind they were mute. They did not defend themselves: they composed inanimate dunes, they composed things bent toward the wind on the churchyard, they only clutched their photos to themselves so that later someone could give the right name to the body that each one had used while alive. We buried Maria inside the box her doll came in.
Some of those who gave orders spoke in the dialect of our part of the country and in fact they wore colored bandages on their faces out of shame that their faces would be visible to the amazement of the dead.
Then there’s the fetus placed on the table under the eyes of the sitting mother she spreads a final silence from her open belly she stares in a stupor at the tiny trajectory of the bullet from one side to the other between the tiny temples.
II. Marzabotto, September 29, 1944
We went out after the silence came from the woods under the peak of Monte Sole and we learned that pigs eat our flesh: my nephew was under the tent and my father a poor thing badly placed on others set in two sides straddling a windowsill, black dolphins beached on a cliff and of the last one there remained the bonnet under his mouth, of fire.
At the first explosion we learned still that they had mined the bodies so that the dead would kill the living who came out of the forests to reassemble them, to undo clinging hands one to the other like little moorings in the dark inlet of death so that each one among the dead would return alone and each one of the living could name that loneliness like the loneliness of a far away relative, could press on that loneliness his mouth, on those hands of powder and outstretched coral as in the days of sunshine when everything was near resemblance. And so they all bent down, they kept their heads down over a number bigger than each body.
(*) During the retreat the Nazi-Fascists massacred about ten thousand civilians, including the elderly, women and children.
GHAZAL OF SHIRAZ'S WOMAN (transcriptions of Hafez)
1.
For her yes – if she were to deign to welcome in the cool cavity of her palms the black pearl of combustion of my heart for the black trifle on her cheek I would hand over the tombs of the fathers at Samarcand and the mosques of Bukhara.
2.
Empty out the clay loins of the amphoras in the supported cups, dear friend, sit near me and let’s watch until dazing the oasis, the falling of all the leaves to the gunshots of the wind and still like from the streaming of these earthly waters, from the white gravel the birds rise up toward the night because for everything that falls another lifts up but nothing of this beauty no more justice will follow her in the incomprehensible enormity of the heavens.
3.
Oh, how many! sweet and playful and vagabond kids make tempests in the live waters of my heart and reap like barbarians king of light the harvest of the banquet tables of the capital that holds out his medieval gold among the cedars and the olive trees.
