NEW POETS FROM TURIN

Italian Wave

VALENTINA DIANA


After it's all over Cassandra approaches


Horse horse do you recognize me?
I was the one who had more words than anyone here.
they only fell for you because you were big and beautiful in the moonlight
that you looked like the gods and the goddesses
but now I'm looking at you, close up you are full of cracks
and woodworms and you're pitiful
you're only a piece of wood
a shell of a ship's hull
you smell like seaweed
you're as wrinkled as an old man's belly
you aren't a horse that a god would want to ride
are you looking around horse?
you see I'm the only one here talking to you
the Trojans are dead
and the Achaeans couldn't care less about you
I'm the only one still looking at you and these are my last words
I spit them at your feet
who cares tomorrow I'll be gone
I'll leave as light as the cork of your wheels
I'll sail this enormous sea in silence
Until Mycenae I don't know what’ll happen to me there
nor do I want to know
nor do I want to see it in a dream
so I'll stay awake,
so I won't have any more dreams after you
the last
a horse-shaped dream.
I came all this way even though I'm barefoot
on this scorched earth that burns my feet,
only out of politeness and to welcome you
in the name of all those who no longer exist
to tell you that I had already seen you anyway
you weren't a surprise, horse
in my clairvoyant’s dream you were as you are
a bay,
even if you were bigger and shinier than you look now
you are so real and so fake
that you make me want to
never foretell the future again.
 

Translations by Gail McDowell.

(More Poems by VALENTINA DIANA)
 

TIZIANO FRATUS

From Historias de Malo Amor


Dagboek (Diary) by Etty Hillesum


You see, a man has just bought a book about the history of the Third Reich,
on the cover, Hitler is writing on a piece of paper, maybe it's a document, next to
Albert Speer and between them the mayor of Nuremberg, Willi Liebel,
with that Dantesque half-sneer of his: I stare at the man with obvious disapproval;
he, with that glacial, mineral phlegm with which he observes the world through
Arian blue eyes, returns the favor with the gaze of someone who has
never doubted that certain things must be done: your hell was already
open, in full and frenetic rotation: I read that your diary begins on the same
day I came into the world, March ninth, and maybe, I tell myself,
that might mean something: what do you think? A white pigeon, with a few
black stripes, truly elegant, has pecked at the spine of the
cover of your book which had fallen: in another photo I saw you
flipping through a newspaper, holding a cat in your arms, probably
smelling its odor and listening to it purr: and holding a cigarette
between the index and middle fingers of your right hand: it took me a few minutes
to understand which hand it was: how many times have I fallen down the uneven
steps on the staircase of your writing (!) All the professions you have
practiced, page after page, the hieroglyphic men, who enter
in tandem with the chameleon and the crocodile women
meets in my days: the God you were trying to help to help
yourself, your body which you broke like the bread of Jesus Christ
at the last supper to distribute to the long-famished men:
I can’t pray to you and that's a blessing: my sacred world is made
of rodents who empty themselves out from within, to slip away without warning:
one day I will read you in your own language: of the two of us I am the foreigner

From Historias de Malo Amor

Translations by Gail McDowell.

( More poems by TIZIANO FRATUS)

---

A Poem by  ELIANA DEBORAH LANGIU

October 18th

Misanthropic
Antisocial
Urticated
I escape casual chitchat
Insufferable to myself
I'm a hen forced to interrelate by caress
They can dupe me with anything
Blocked by com-passion against these bars
At four chitchat's over
In the lose a turn space
Wearing the urban uniform washed and ironed just yesterday evening
By the warm and competent bodies of silent cats
That sleep
Bringing folds of dreams of cat food and gardens
Into vulnerable buildings
Talking suffocates me it pastes itself on it dries
It’s humor, serum, pollution

Give me the glassex I'll cancel it right from the start

Father mine who art in Heaven
a civil prayer


I

Father mine who art in heaven stay there
don't return to earth because there is war here.
I had hoped that you would be the one to atone
that I would be the one to pay in this life
for every war crime with your life.
That I would be the one to make amends with your loss
and bring peace back here on earth.


II

I deceived myself father that this sacrifice
could help on earth. You might be in heaven now
but you went to war like your father
without your father against yourself.
It doesn’t really matter war is war.
I don't have your stories to tell now
history doesn’t speak of you or of your father.

 

(More poems by FRANCESCA TINI BRUNOZZI)