Versione Italiana | Nota biografica | Versione lettura |
A long silence came
when we looked for your name.
Then your mother said “Florence,
the white of Saint Mary of the Flower
of the baptistery, of the bell tower,
Piazza de’ Pitti’s bright patience
where sun’s shower gathered
and silence embodied in our kiss
and our fears cowered”.
No one has ever given me that sense
of rebirth, of Renaissance.
It was not that I liked it, but rather...
that that name was your right
and that all of a sudden I felt like your father.
It was fall, for a while the light came
like the ocean: in waves.
Like the sunshine wasn’t wanting to stay,
but to reach out and save,
and it gave us back Rome ,
its bell chime, your name,
home.
Back
or for the first time.
Which place will you call home?
Like me, like everyone,
when you’ll feel alone.
You’ll feel this strange freedom that none
wants to keep or understand,
when you can reach nothing with your hand
and everything shines and has no end.
When each and every blade of grass and grain
swings in the wind and calls
from silence and beauty into a strange pain
that burns and falls
deep like it was your very joy
your own and only soul.
I can barely bear my sorrow.
What will I do tomorrow,
without a reason why
your eyes will fly beyond the porch’s shadow
into something nameless, that will just make you cry,
beyond everything and every name,
even your mother’s and mine?
When every name and word are taken away,
and you can say or think nothing at all,
when every tree is a sail
and every wind’s blow is a call.
When everything I did would break
your only chance, your only soul.
I don’t know what I mean
anymore when I say words like “you” or “me”.
“You” is just you, or you both?
Like an oak pierced and flared by the sun.
My chest is a square
crossed by a child who runs
and scares a thick mass of pigeons
that takes flight in waves.
Words fly away the same way.
Not just “you”, but every word
sounds like it is flying in a new world,
into tears, into silence (my silence, not yours),
into fears, into violence of a frail loving claim.
The window has lost its own name
and I am not sure what it became,
I look out from a square wooden hole
into the wood, into the world.
And what is the wood?
Still brown, shaking green,
spears of shadow saluting a shining crown,
the boundless kingdom I used to call “trees” and “wind”
and “sun”.
I’m waiting for you and I’m watching your mother,
I’m something unknown: I’m a father,
shaky stars in the dawn are enough for laughing
in the face of the death, of nothing,
are enough to besiege me with whats, hows and whys.
Although you are not born yet, I see with your eyes.