Three Poems by Piergiorgio Viti - Translated by Christopher Schwarten and Elisa Aceri

 

Rem sleep

 

translated by Christopher Schwarten

 

Yet the blue lines of the parking lot

had disappeared.

Yes, I was wandering among caravans,

small gardens, wooden steps

that led me nowhere.

Where is my car, where is it,

I scolded myself,

all while a dense mist

began to thin out the profiles

and outlines of the bungalows

of what appeared to be a tourist resort

and who knows how I got there.

The blanket of mist rose,

slowly blurring out every light.

I opened my eyes

out of fear

and, right at that moment,

as if you were with me in my dream,

but who knows where, on the sidelines,

you took my hand from under the pillow,

as if to tell me

not to worry,

that we always

find a way together.

 

 

after a documentary

 

translated by Elisa Aceri

 

If millions of years ago

they hadn’t existed,

we wouldn’t have had

all this oxygen.

We would have remained where we were

(and who knows where we were, who knows…),

life wouldn’t have developed

helixes, binary codes

nothing at all,

a clean slate, an absolute zero.

 

But thanks to stromatolites,

to their air bubbles,

we exist

proliferate

we kiss in the evening

while eating soup.

And thanks to them

in the gardens of Recanati*

kids can wave hello

and at night, under the covers,

I can whisper to you

Hug me

for if you turn away,

it gets colder.

*Recanati is an Italian city, famous as the birthplace of poet Giacomo Leopardi.

 

 

Melissa

Translated by Elisa Aceri

Melissa lives behind a screen.

A dull life.

Never a picture of her,

never a glimpse of her mouth or nail polish.

Nobody knows with what eyes she wakes up.

Nobody knows how she supports herself,

if she works or studies,

if every week she stands in line at the post office.

Melissa seems like a loner.

Someone who prefers felines

instead of dates or dinner invites.

Someone who’s into oversized sweaters,

and juniper teas while watching tv.

 

But every week

she cleans the beach by her house.

She sweeps up bottles and cans

and plastic corks.

Then, in a precise order,

she gathers them at the centre of the beach.

She takes pictures for social media.

You’re this, she says.

You’re cumbersome monsters.

Dumb beasts that escaped from their cages.

You’re cancers sick with cancer.

Off-key butterflies that should be hung on a wall.

You’re karma made of polyester.

You’re orphans of yourselves.

 

And after posting,

she disappears into a digital hibernation.

Melissa disappears

in a megabyte seclusion

and maybe, with no more gigabytes,

she goes somewhere

to atone for the sins of the world,

to pay that debt

that we all have

in the double entry of conscience.

 

 

Piergiorgio Viti lives in Italy, where he works as a professor.

He has published five books of poetry and the sixth is in the press. His poems are translated into five languages and published in anthologies, literary sites, magazines of all over the world. He also wrote for the theater: "The fable of Virginio and Virgilio" with famous singer Tosca as protagonist and "Ray's dreams" (dedicated to Ray Charles) with an important actor as Carlo Di Maio. He went on stage in the theater as author and acting voice for "The voice of man", a tribute to the Italian song-writer Sergio Endrigo. He is involved in the dissemination of poetry through the organization and participation in festivals around the world.

 

 

 

Five Sublime Poems by Cáit O'Neill McCullagh

 

Kin

 

(After Jorge Teillier’s 'End of The World')

 

The day the world begins

I will gild my lips with ochre

spit my breath onto this rock

sing kin into this earth-womb

and a navel-cut child

will sleep at a breast

a deer’s eye will hold time’s arrow

without stooping, she will fall

and the skein-scream of bone pipes

will mark this gift

 

only then will our children leave the forest

tangle their song spirals to untravelled ways

they will soon run crying, home-lost

unknowing this, that they can never return

I will stay to stretch this sinew’s span

beat my fingers to the skin-thin of time

and paint my palm to your future eyes

 

I hear the beginning in the song of stone on hazel

in the fire-clearing of birches where land slips to stream

in the siphoning of life from fossil and forest

from the flow-country peat

your dead will lift from this bog

uncanny hauntings, untethered

and I will say: ‘This world can end

because in the crucible of its birth, the axe and plough

have started their quarrel with all that once sustained’

 

Migrant

 

I was precious, seed-carried

nomad, secret in the folds

of my parent’s hopes

they sailed moons

to blow me to this shore

where I found my feet

letting them step me

into your heart

 

the songs that I sing are sisters

to your stories of roots and soil

and they are older

made deep in time

 

before this earth was measured

into pockets of gold 

songs spiralled from the people

who walked it

feeling its seasons move them

from ebb to ebb

they frayed its coasts

close-chased the colours of shoals

 

I sing to spill longing

into these waves

to push myself hard

to the wind’s resistance

it returns me to you  

to this hold-fast of place

to the between-house

of becoming and belonging

here, to tie the grain-knot

around my migrant’s heart

 

I hear your song

it is iron on stone

in the bog, it weeps 

your tethered dead

root it there, they bind it

with place and time

with people and blood

 

I go to hear their whispers

they are memory and now

I go to ask for homecoming

to know that the dead want us to live

 

we placed them

upon swans’ wings

so that they might fly  

and we put their ashes

to the storm and watched

as they turned the sun for us

 

the bones you keep in stone 

they are way-markers only

look again to the sky, and

you will see the stars

this canopy of care

it will guide us

and shelter all 

 

Strata

 

This is the archaeology of my mother

the soft earth we mounded over her

around her bones, also soft

worn with carrying

I would dance with her

with her bones

plunge oxter-deep into this peat

and excavate her from my dreams

 

at night she becomes again

a kind of devil incarnate

and I cannot turn from her

so, I re-turn like a pilgrim

enter her ferrous-scented shrine

back to that bloody feral meat

where once we shared my birth

 

when the day wakes me

I know what fills her grave

how seven years have freed her from flesh

how oxides have blistered her hair to ochre

which beasts feasted on her periwinkle eyes 

my mother has leaked, human soup

she has sifted into sediments of soil

 

I make this archive of her stratigraphy

her breast as she met my hunger

her lips as she kissed our story into my ears

the gape-ache of distance, that absent presence

as I grew to make a whole world without her

taking every place that she had left on this earth

 

moss lifts from stone

as memory peels from me

and as the old moon is cradled into the new

I sink to put my pilgrim’s palms to her pasts

 

Before the Rain (Petrichor)

Before the rain and now after it

in the blood-iron earth, honeyed

ochre-sweet and sweat-warm

the auratic aroma of loss filling us, already

sound gentle as we rushed you from the water

unknowing that it would be your last

downpouring, the fall of all of you

earth shifter, your hands splayed

they had spaded fields then till and tar

only the memory of hands now

life-crease cracked

what was left to hold you by

when you lost your own hold?

This is how we buried you

earth-laid as womb-enfolded

your skin softened from yellow to cream

in that musk of the always-near deluge

we spilled you into the rain of our tears.

 

We spilled you into the rain of our tears

in that musk of the always-near deluge

your skin softened from yellow to cream

earth-laid as womb-enfolded

this is how we buried you

when you lost your own hold.

What was left to hold you by?

Only the memory of hands

life-crease cracked

they had spaded fields then till and tar

earth shifter, your hands splayed

downpouring the fall of all of you

unknowing that it would be your last

sound, gentle as we rushed you from the water

the auratic aroma of loss already filling us

ochre-sweet and sweat-warm

the blood-iron earth, honeyed

before the rain, and now after it.

 

Petrichor - the smell of rain, from the Greek petra, meaning stone, and ichor, the golden fluid that flows in the veins of the immortals. 

 

Litanies

 

Me six and I’m beside my mother

us in the pew, mass up on the altar

and we’re thinking about our dinner

letting the everyday melt through

I taste it, that delicious un-spoken

us ourselves, our convivial conspiracy

 

we ‘coo’ my brother, the baby always

sifting dreams between his thumbs

like he was shuffling tiny coins

our chatter-kiss-words fall

gentle-slow as sunlit dust

 

they loiter at the ears of my granny

revering her shell-coiled pinkness 

she was as secret-soft as whispers

muffling rosary mantras

each beaded prayer decorating

the gnarled percussion of her fingers

 

this is how the poetry of my family happened

spoken and imagined answered, and unanswered

felt, litanies that made their holdfast into memory

incantations of story telling us how to belong.

 

When my father was dying

the nurses held an iPad to his ear

he no longer seeing nor speaking

and me whimper-whispering what?

That I loved him and ‘don’t worry’

also, not saying ‘don’t die daddy’

 

his mouth could no longer hold words

and yet I sensed the poetry of him too

‘It’ll be grand’ just his everyday way

and now his benediction for us always

Cáit O'Neill McCullagh is a straying ethnologist, archaeologist and curator who writes at home in the Highlands of Scotland.  Exploring how people living in fragile environments are using traditional ecological knowledges to assemble more sustaining and sustainable futures, she co-produces films, exhibitions, and new writing with people throughout the Highlands and Islands.  Her research has been published in books and journals.  She also writes articles for print and online journalism.  Starting to write poems in December 2020, some of her early poems have appeared in Northwords Now, Spilling Cocoa over Martin Amis, Bell Caledonia, Drawn to the Light, and The Banyan Review.  Joint winner of the Boyne Writers’ Festival Poetry Day Ireland 2021 competition, she gave her first featured reading at Limerick’s Lime Square Poets.  Her poems have been making exhibits of themselves too, including in North Antrim’s Pub Poetry Network’s ‘This is the World exhibition’ (August 2021) and in Crowvus’ Scottish Book Week event ‘Poetry in the High Street’ (November 2021).

 

 

Four Poems by John D Robinson

 

EMPLOYMENT CREDENTIALS

 

‘Wait! there’s got to be

another way!’

but if you were the 12

or 13-year-old boy with

an angelic voice, from a

poverty stricken Italian

family in the 17^th century,

there may not have

been another way!

but

quite often, these

singers were treated

like today’s rock stars

and became very

wealthy, aiding their

families and friends,

living a life of

comfort, for the price

of their testicles:

‘Thanks mum, dad’

Castrato operations

were, thankfully,

finally,

banned in 1870.

 

 

PROLONGED

 

His biological mother was in

long term prison for her part

in a murder: father and the

young son of 6, seemed

happy and they made a

good world together:

then the father met another

woman, who moved in

with the father and son

within a few weeks and the

little boy’s world was

brutally and viciously

broken: she would insult

him constantly, order

him to stand in a certain

place for hours at a time,

make him watch her and

his father eat their

take-away meals: the

little boy, was barely fed,

and then, mostly, only

scraps but the beatings

with kicks and punches

from his father and the

woman were frequent

and when they killed

the little boy, they

stopped the torture:

initially the couple stated

that the boy had fallen

down a flight of

concrete stairs but the 91

separate injuries all

over his body, had

been inflicted over a

prolonged period of time:

both vile, sadistic adults

were sentenced to life:

the funeral of the young

boy was attended by

hundreds of mourners,

strangers, mostly.

 

 

MAKING DISTANCE

 

Of course, I should have

backed-away,

made distance,

I didn’t,

she died young of

narcotics, of violence,

betrayal, regrets, of a

savage harshness

that too many of us

know of:

she was strong,

even when she

knew death was

on her shoulders:

our interaction

although brief,

is still here,

particularly,

that time when we

kissed and

embraced

and then,

suddenly,

let go,

making that

distance,

as we should

have done,

knowing then,

we had

broken all

the rules.

 

 

SUSIE’S STORY

 

Susie was a sexual

‘pass-the parcel’,

Bob liked to think

of himself as her

protector and pimp:

Karl loved her and

wanted to marry her:

Bob fed her drugs

took monetary

 ‘bookings’ from

creeps to satisfy

their warped

perversions:

Karl was always

close by, at times

witnessing the

abuse:

Bob vanished when

the police became

interested:

Karl committed

suicide

and Susie became

hollow, see-

through, she became

mute,

but,

but, her eyes,

even Diablo

dare not look

into those.

John D Robinson is a UK poet: hundreds of his poems have appeared in print and online: he has published several chapbooks and four full collections of poetry: He is a multiple Pushcart Prize Nominee.