Abstract
FORGETFUL AMERICA
(AMERICA SCORDAROLA)
For you who are going away
without even saying goodbye to us
where you weep over approaching death
(because you get tired of shutting yourself up in the cellar
here in the gloomy days of rain)
we will see your child play
tipcat around the boilers
that collect rainwater.
But you won’t stretch out your hand to him,
if nails pierce his naked feet,
with an envelope of pesos!
Come back again here among us:
you’ll wash your face in the morning,
you think you’ve found a new life, but for us
you’re slowly getting lost in the shadow of the passerby
rounding the cluster of houses,
the buses are serious and fatal.
Come back, it’s time you tasted
soft focaccia crumbs,
and how will we send you
the aroma from the ovens?
Write to us, a rope is dangling
between us across the sea
and you want to break it?
We still play on the seesaw,
come back to your sorrow here,
the child is getting big
and his eyes are searching all around.
We will all welcome you
and you’ll find yourself again in your grown son:
you’ll have to soothe his wings, awkward
like those of a captured rose-beetle
that flies tied to a thread.
He already carries his sullen
head inside his cloak
and shoots fierce looks your way
on the bridge over the river
imagining he can terrify you even down there.
But Papa the American no longer writes. (July 1948)
THERE WAS ONCE AMERICA
(C’ERA L’AMERICA)
There is no longer in the world today the paternal illusion that there still exists a country called America. And Venezuela, which is what we have left, isn’t worth a glass of water from the Basento.
There was once the America, beautiful and distant,
of my twenty-year-old father.
My father ended up with a broken heart.
America here, America there,
where is my father’s
America now?
America will be my land
with a gigantic sun and moon,
mild air, blue sky,
a night of feasting
for worker and farmer.
That’s how they talked softly:
Steamship that says yes and no
on the waves that hold you in hand,
I want to see what my fate will be.
The Serenade opened its doors
and I plowed the sea night and day
toward that land that did not listen to it.
My friend was shot to death in that land,
they put wax on his face,
an identical wax face.
They came back with the house and the vineyard
for a bed of weeds
from so far away.
Where is our America now?
Grandma believed in the world beyond,
we children read our fathers’ wax faces.
Our America does not exist.
The wind has come,
the carousel has crashed,
our neighbor has died,
after he’d been in that land.
America here, America there,
where is my father’s
America now?
(January 1952)
MY BEAUTIFUL HOMELAND
(LA MIA BELLA PATRIA)
I am a blade of grass
a trembling blade of grass.
And my Homeland is where the grass trembles.
A breath of wind can transplant
my seed faraway.
(1949)
ECONOMY LESSONS
(LEZIONI DI ECONOMIA)
One day I asked you who had planted
the lookout firs
you see on the Dolomites.
I asked you so many other things
about the rock rose, the myrtle,
the viscous inula,
names without economy.
You answered, among other things,
that a father who loves his children
can only watch them leave.
(Portici, December 18 1952)
PSALM TO THE HOUSE AND THE EMIGRANTS
(SALMO ALLA CASA E AGLI EMIGRANTI)
Bent over the earth, the small, worn door of the house,
we are the children and the door is laden with other sweat,
and the earth, our portion of it, smells both good and bad.
They kill me, they arrest me, I will starve to death, choking
because wind and dust, under the door gap, burn my throat.
No other woman will love me, war will break out,
the house will crumble, my mother will die, and I will lose my friends.
My town is losing its people, my fellow townsmen board ship
without songs, with their new wardrobe of shirts and underwear.
Are they going after the ring? Like in the game,
riding the mules harnessed with blankets and with the iron shafts
hooked on the wire stretched over the roadway on the feast of Saint Pancras?
You are also leaving, fathers of the earth, and you leave
the gap under the door blacker than black smoke.
What glimmer will there be for the children you gave life to
when they come back home in the evening?
(Portici, November 7 1952)
DAYLIGHT HAS BROKEN
(È FATTO GIORNO)
To choose me I want the prettiest one land after land I want to take her. (from a folk song)
I
Daylight has broken, we are back in the game too
with the faces and clothes we used to have.
The brawniest sodbusters
go tie the clapper to the bells.
Today this song from the processions
marching toward the small wooden crosses
will have to do.
The crowd of overcoats
that spot the road
clapping their hands
marched up from the Rabatana
and down from the houses on the Mountain.
But cruel cardboard monsters
grow on their hair:
they give blessings, throw coins
like almond candies, and crack their whip.
II
Then out comes a shapeless poor wretch
who has miraculously regained his voice,
he tells of a hidden place
and a sleeping woman.
We all know your true glory,
Lord of the Cross
who no longer needs incenses.
And you will hear a new song again
that is the oldest moan of a boy
the wildest scream of a woman.
And you will learn the subdued way
that comes from a place where we’ll have to go
in the happiness of the fear
of going toward love.
III
Take longer steps, popes and rulers,
in the light of the poor wretches who have proven you wrong.
Because the sun is rising in the sky
and it tells every truth, even about you,
who steal our heart and our tongue
just to be accepted.
It says that this evening two embers
make a fire inside the smoky shacks.
IV
Wind, help the poor wretch,
touched by the edge of her sweet sleep,
that runs, pursued, after her rosy shawl of sunset.
To the enveloping boredom she promises
the lost legend
and that night will no longer be dark and silent.
(1952)