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[Excerpt: from v.125 to v.152]
.
Out of him
The country -in desperation- was howling at the moon
It was howling in the shadow of a buzzard's wing
A boneless wing, hanging by a cloud of rags.
Out of him
Rubble of villages and crumbled people
- Crumbled and windy
- Rubble of grief and anger
He went straight on, like the northern wind
Howling along with the country, trampling on
Billions of unfulfilled promises and immense carnages.
He went straight on, barely dodging
The cracks in the Palace and the biological wells
And the altars of ballots - shored and secluded.
His eyes dug through skeletons of houses and
People. He dug where others, before, had dug:
By his bloody fingers - bloody tendons of frayed hope.
He dug where others had reached feeble, shriveled breaths.
He dug and dug..
- Good Christians. Oh, good Christians
Good Christians, give us some water
Give us some warmth, hope.. Good Christians..
He dug..
Yet, he got nothing but his void glance
Nothing but the breath of his glance
Out of him
The country, desperate, kept howling at the moon.
- -
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[This is an excerpt, from v.125 to v.152, of my long poem 'Il Vento e il Fiume', published at Amazon as an Italian Edition. The poem has 666 verses]
*
This excerpt raises many questions. It's not just about earthquakes. He is a witness to altars of bullets. Is this a fragment from the biography of a poet? Powerful!
Hi Denis, thank you so much for your keen comment. Indeed, 'The Wind & The River' (the 666-line long poem of which this is an excerpt) is a kind of 'autobiography' that I wrote many, many years ago. I wrote it in Italian, then I translated some parts of it, but a sort of 'psychological block' stopped me. Only recently, with the help of Tom Billsborough, all its 666 lines have been translated into English and published in a bilingual edition.
i also like the picture. the cover of your book is not a pic of a destruction but a calm river
3000 dead,300,000 homeless. terrible these days, another terrible eartquake in iran. a similar situation as the one you have described in your beautiful poem
yes, terrible... really terrible. And then the awful facts that followed: using the plight of those poor people to make money through corruption!
Impressionist description with vision. The awful feeling after an earthquake: ' Yet he got nothing but his void glance'. Haunting.
earthquakes.. a terrifying force of nature.. a deadly force.. that you, as a N.Zealander, know even too well.. thank you, dear Michael
to understand how terrible could earthquakes be, read ''The Really Big One'', by Kathryn Schulz, 'The New Yorker', July 20,2015 - on the seismic risk in the Pacific Northwest..
In that period (Dec.1980) I wrote also a short poem with a direct reference to the earthquake - here is the translation of the central verse: [..] The beginning of the month caught a glimpse of My soul in Irpinia, the land Where the earthquake struck and Ravaged and killed. There, Sadness - and despair and grief - is far Greater, drowned in those people's pain. Men and Women and children, there, are used to sadness. Only the dead remain indifferent. [..]