Poetry / Contemporary Man. (excerpts)

Giorno dopo giorno / Contemporary Man. (Excerpts).
Translation© Jake Spatz.

1. Alle fronde dei salici / Up in the willow branches.

And to sing—and how could we sing
with a foreign boot on our heart,
and what with the dead abandoned in the squares
on the ice-hard grass—
how sing to the child’s accompaniment,
the mourning bleat of it,
how sing to the mother’s black shriek
as she stumbled forward face to face with her son
crucified up on a telegraph pole?

Up in the willow branches, even our lyres,
that sacrifice,
EVEN OUR LYRES were hanged,
lightly swaying around on the sad wind.

2. Lettera / Letter.

This unbreakable hush in the streets,
this drowsy wind now sliding along on its belly
in the dead leaves,
now climbing up to the colors of foreign flags…

maybe the anxiety of getting out word to you
before the heavens come to another close
atop another day,
maybe the slow-going sloth of it,
the sloth, our pettiest evil…

Life doesn’t exist
in this quaking, black beat of the heart,
it doesn’t exist in pity, it’s nothing more
than a prank blood pulls when death
is what’s in flower—

My sweet gazelle,
I remember you in that bright, full-blown geranium
perched on a wall the machineguns shot to hell.

O how can death console the living now,
even death for love?

4. Neve / Snow.

Night falls: and again you leave us,
sweet planetary sights—
trees, animals,
paupers clad in the greatcoats of soldiers,
mothers whose laps were sown
with the salting of tears…

And the snow lights us up from out in the meadows
like moonlight, moonlight

so many have died

O beat now BEAT at your faces,
beat all the way down to your hearts—

let someone, anyone, cry and cry in this quiet,
in this white ring of the buried

5. Giorno dopo giorno / Day after day.

Day after day and more of the same damn words
        and more of the same damned blood
        and still the same goddamned gold.
I know what you are, my fellows,
        brute fiends, blight of the earth:
Pity sank down at your gnashing,
sank down, and the good cross left us.
And gone my Elysium now,
        gone, I can never return now.

O raise tombs on the beaches we shall,
and one for every lacerated field,
and not one for a hero.
Death has toyed with us far too often, we know the sound,
the air gone one monotonous drumming of leaves,

sirocco blasting the high ground,
marsh-coot flapping its way up over the fog

8. Milano, agosto 1943 / Milan, August 1943.

You rummage around in the dust in vain, poor hand,
the city is dead.
The last of its groans rang out, all of us heard it,
it rumbled across the heart of the river Naviglio.
The city is dead,
and the nightingale up on its mast high over the convent,
where it used to sing at the sunset,
has fallen, fallen, fallen:
the city is dead.

Dig wells no more in the courtyards,
the living are out of thirst.
Don’t touch the dead, red as they are,
swollen as they are:
leave them be in the earth of the homes they lived in,
it’s dead, the city is dead.

11. Scritto forse su una tomba / Possible epitaph.

Here, here, and ever so far from society,
the sun beats down on your hair
and kindles it back to honey,
and the bush reminds us,
the living,
of what was then the summer’s last cicada,
and the air-raid siren’s deep alarm
screaming across the Lombard pastureland…

O voices burned by the air, WHAT DO YOU WANT?

Unrest rises up from the ground the same as ever.

13. Dalla Rocca di Bergamo alta / From the Stronghold of Upper Bergamo.

You’ve heard the cock’s crow cutting up the air
on the other side of the walls,
from out beyond the towers
that were frozen in a light you didn’t know—
        the lightning shriek of life,
and you’ve heard the voices rustle like leaves in the cells,
        you’ve heard the town patrol
call out like birds in the hours approaching dawn.
And you said not a word for yourself:
you were then and there in the ring of smallest reach,
        the ring at the bottom:
and mute the antelope, mute the heron then,
lost in an ominous puff of smoke,
        the totems of a world just barely born…

And the February moon
went passing full and open over the land,
but to you it was only a piece of memory,
a shape lit up in the silence.

You too amid the Stronghold’s cypress trees
now move without a noise;
here too the anger, the anger itself subsides
in the green surround of the young dead,
and pity at such a remove,
pity at such a remove is almost joy.

15. S’ode ancora il mare / I’ve been able to hear the sea again.

For nights now I’ve been able to hear the sea again,
gently rising and falling,
smoothing up the sands.

The echo a voice’s echo, a voice now shut in the mind,
an echo that rises in time—and this too, this
persistent crying of gulls—
this crying of tower-birds, maybe tower-birds,
birds that April drives out into the plains.

You were close to me once, you were, with such a voice;
and all the same I’d hope there comes to you,
now, some memory-echo of me,
just like this dusky murmur of the sea.

16. Elegia / Elegy.

You’re back again, chill messenger of night,
        casting a clean light
on the balconies of decimated homes,
lighting anonymous tombs,
        the derelict remnant
        of a smoky land.

Our dream’s been lain to rest here,
lain to rest.

And all alone, you turn towards the north,
where every last thing goes running
lightlessly on to death,

you the resistance.

20. Uomo del mio tempo / Contemporary Man.

Still you belong to the stone and sling,
Contemporary Man.
It was you behind the fuselage,
with wings of malice, barometers of death,
—I saw you—there, in the coach of fire,
        belted, noosed,
running the torture wheels.
        I saw you,
        saw you yourself,
with your exact science, your doctrine of extinction,
loveless, Christless.
You were killing all over again, as always,
just as our fathers killed,
        just as the animals
killed when first they saw you.
And this blood now stinks the same as it did on the day
when brother said to brother:
        “let us go unto the fields.”
And that constant,
that cold echo
has made its way to you, through your own doing.