Rescue

How can I live in this country

Where the foot knocks against

The unburied bones of kin?

I hear voices, see smiles. I cannot

Write anything; five hands

Seize my pen and order me to write

The story of their lives and deaths.

Was I born to become

a ritual mourner?

I want to sing of festivities,

The greenwood into which Shakespeare

Often took me. Leave

To poets a moment of happiness,

Otherwise your world will perish.

I will neither resurrect the past nor return.

Sleep, Romeo, Juliet, on your headrest of stone feathers.

I won't raise your bound hands from the ashes.

Let the cat visit the deserted cathedrals,

its pupil flashing on the altars. Let an owl

nest on the dead ogive.

Love means to look at yourself

The way one looks at distant things

For you are only one thing among many.

And whoever sees that way heals his heart,

Without knowing it, from various ills —

A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.

Those dying here, the lonely

Forgotten by the world,

Our tongue becomes for them

The language of an ancient planet.

Until, when all is legend

And many years have passed,

On a great Campo di Fiori

Rage will kindle at a poet's word.

From life, from the apple cut by the flaming knife,

what grain will be saved?My son, believe me, nothing remains,

Only adult toil,

the furrow of fate in the palm.

Only toil,

Nothing more.

They used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds

To feed the dead who would come disguised as birds.

I put this book here for you, who once lived

So that you should visit us no more.

Only when two times, two forms are drawn

Together and their legibility

Disturbed, do you see that immortality

Is not very different from the present

And is for its sake. You pick a fragment

Of grenade which pierced the body of a song

On Daphnis and Chloe.

— How is it, Chloe, that your pretty skirt

Is torn so badly by the winds that hurt

Real people, you who, in eternity, sing

The hours, sun in your hair appearing

And disappearing? How is that your breasts

Are pierced by shrapnel, and the oak groves burn,

While you, charmed, caring not at all, turn

To run through forests of machinery and concrete

And haunt us with the echoes of your feet?

Someone will read as moral

That the people of Rome or Warsaw

Haggle, laugh, make love

As they pass by martyrs' pyres.

Someone else will read

Of the passing of things human,

Of the oblivion

Born before the flames have died. But that day I thought only

Of the loneliness of the dying,

Of how, when Giordano

Climbed to his burning

There were no words

In any human tongue

To be left for mankind,

Mankind who live on.