Antonella Anedda

Before supper, before the lamps warm the beds and the trees's foliage absorbs the dark and the night's abandoned. In the curtailed space of dusk whole seasons pass by unrecognized. Then the sky's freighted with clouds and air-currents drum at brambles and stumps.
...

To unearth the reason for a verb
because the truth is it's not time yet
and we don't know whether to rush forwards or take flight.
...

This language has no innocence
- listen to how speeches break up
as if also here there were a war
a different war but war
...

to Nathan Zach


These too are war poems
composed while it rages, not far off, not nearby,
seated askew at a table lit by lamps
...

It's a blessing to be as far away as you are
the most innocent among distant things:
table-niche and apple
...

Just as it is now, the olive tree on the balcony
the wind transforming the clouds. Beyond the century
in the evenings to come when neither you nor I
will be here, when the years will be branches
...

to my mother and father


May wind from Bonifacio to Corte, mistral from the Sardinia Strait retreating to Santa Teresa and south of south to Campidano. Star-shaped archipelagoes and godless beauty's fury.
...

That evil may decompose like the hamster buried in a shoebox in the garden's earth.

That the fright destined for others come to me tonight.
I see her, this woman who for hours stared at the tv
on and now screams at another body in twilight
...

If I've written it's for thought
because my thoughts are troubled about life
it's for those happy beings
close in the evening shadow
...

I love her fierceness when she fights me,
shouting 'Not fair!' Her eyes slitting
like shutters in cities by the sea.
Her life is rife with bonfires—seen and unseen—
...

gives joy only if read in a broken rhythm, pausing
at every period, parting your lips a little at the colons
What: a pity to die my love. To say: 'I don't love you anymore'
...

The kitchen is a promontory. The pans are reefs eaten by a wolf-wind that blows and runs

in circles on the island. The railing is a grey gust, his mate our sharp sister. Just awaken

we are the birds bent over the sink, tired of the nightly migration, confused by the rockets
...

Round, frozen in its oceans, transparent
like a cell under the microscope
or horizontal with mountains planted firmly above fields
with the tongue of rivers and the stretched out sea.
...

I didn't want names for unknown dead
yet I wanted them to exist
I wanted an anonymous tongue
- mine -
...

To unearth the reason for a verb
because the truth is it's not time yet
and we don't know whether to rush forward or take flight.
...

She was running towards a shelter, she shielded her head.
She belonged to a weary image
no different from any woman
surprised by the rain.
...

The things I name in poetry are not noble:
they lie under the palate, watchful, aware only of the warmth
ignorant of the tongue.
...

To those who asked him the difference between being sad and
being heart-broken, Nachman answered that being heart-broken
was not an obstacle to joy.
(Nachman of Breslaw)
...

Just as it is now, the olive tree on the balcony
the wind transforming the clouds. Beyond the century
in the evenings to come when neither you nor I
will be here, when the years will be branches
...

This language has no innocence
- listen to how speeches break up
as if also here there were a war
a different war but war
...