L'angolo di Adeo Poesie in inglese

FOR LISA AND MICHAEL ON THEIR WEDDING DAY EVEN THE MAGPIES COME BACK AGAIN MID-AUGUST SPARROWS MOON-HOWLING OR HEALING? BOOMERANGS & FRESBEES IN PRAISE OF CONSOLATION AGAIN YOUR SOUL IS ON ICE

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FOR LISA AND MICHAEL ON THEIR WEDDING DAY

The filaments of love
Weave the tapestry of life.
So many threads come together
Today, joining our pasts
And our futures, today.

Many ancestors
Left their own homelands
To harvest new lives
In the green fields of America.

May Michael with Lisa continue
That journey, today.
Our past and our future
Are blessed again and again
Because of your wedding, today.

We pray that as parents
We will have lighted your way
Towards a more loving tomorrow.


EVEN THE MAGPIES COME BACK AGAIN

A few years ago, dear Eusebio, you spoke
of some flights that often brought hope
even when hidden in wet morning dew drops
or inside the seeds of a hailstorm. Seated today
next to Giovanni, high on the porch
where even my mother awaits (as a bird
on the branch admiring those mountains
one day she will leave far behind) I saw,
up near the Mountains of Noon, a shadow
descending toward the deep valley
until it landed inside the garden.
She rested a little on top of the doghouse,
just long enough to measure
what distance would take her back home.
Three or four times she twisted her head
then filled with old thirst, she
lowered her beak in Chira’s bowl.
Batting her eyelids she spread out her wings
and took off again towards the dark peak

(Composed on June 5, 199, in Vigo di Cadore, Italy, while revisiting the paternal home where the author was born)

NOTES TO "EVEN THE MAGPIES COME BACK AGAIN"
"Eusebio": a nickname friends gave to the Italian poet Eugenio Montale.
"Giovanni": he is the author’s brother-in-law. In the original Ladino dialect and in the Italian translation, the actual term used is "brother-in-law" but, since the English word impedes lyric fluidity, the translator chose to use the proper name of the person referred to in the poem.
"Mountains of Noon": in Italian they are called the "Pale del Mezzogiorno", these are three mountain peaks that, from the village of Vigo di Cadore, in the Province of Belluno, indicate the exact position of the sun at noon-time; hence their name.
"Chira": the name of my brother’s hunting dog, kept in a dog-house inside the family garden--an animal enclosure within a vegetables enclosure....

MID-AUGUST SPARROWS

It’s only mid-August but the sparrows
in the back yard scream, today; overcast
humid and cooler than televised forecasts,
their feeding frenzies appall and amaze.
Not Orpheus descending their screeches,
their dives at the feeders like squadrons
of bombers denying Saddam Hussein
his empire of sand and of stone.
Even the squirrels abandon the bunkers
as our two tomcats, gravity-grounded,
fly friendly sorties. The sparrows prevail
and attack until the feeders are bare.
Who will refuel the seed at the root?

(8:20:97)

NOTES:
"Saddam Hussein" re: the Gulf War.
"two tomcats" our two feline house pets; also fighter planes;...
(tom)ahawk missiles. Other words are loaded with
multiple-warhead connotations.
MOON-HOWLING OR HEALING ?

Far better than ghosts, residual bats

now live in my attic under my sheet,

they nibble my fingers and tickle the hair

on my feet. Oh what a treat, exchanging

such friends for little, innocuous beasties

who breathlessly travel by night with

radar vibration while most of my days

endlessly drip devoid of temptation.

(1 Nov. 1997)


BOOMERANGS & FRESBEES

I dreamed a rhino
who, with its long horn,
smelled a poppy in the field.
--Giulia Niccolai

because, non-offending, I wish
with my wood-be boomeranging
to answer your love-guided fresbees,

departing from nada through chaos
mandalas dark spots of the sun to
desert mountains & caves of the moon

returning to nada like tail-to-mouth
serpents that dance in the sand
unknowing the force from your hands

promoting cart-wheeling disasters
eroding horizons that glue sea to land,
sometimes we get there
ignoring what falls and what stands

(28 feb 1998)

NOTE:
In Giulia Niccolai’s original Italian: "ho sognato un rinoceronte/che, con il lungo corno,/ annusava un papavero in un campo."
IN PRAISE OF CONSOLATION
for Diane Ackerman, with thanks

To note that rose-fingering clown
when sleep-lidded moonlight wets
the shadows of his failing beam,
I dip to measure the pulse of each bell.

Against the eternal dark we scrape
and slope from coop to cave to globe
hoping to fathom our rages through
waxing & waning of mortar and stone.

Somehow between heart and tongue
we slither on dryness wanting to see
touch & feel why apricots maybe
foreshadow the sea: check this our

check-mate as it unrolls from barren hills
with fear, love and thrust the perennial
tattoos on our skin, loins, and frost,
while every half stands as one holding post

to some crystalline chamber reclaiming
what’s lost that we wish to regain;
and the rain is bewitching the plains
while sand fills our sandals with strains.

Then will we know how to eat consolation
like some “ripe apricot...small enough to devour
as two hemispheres... Ambiguity is [the] hallmark.”
This wills our folly, this hallmark of love
that rewarms “in cupped hands, holding it
as you might a brandy snifter,

then caress the velvety sheen
with one thumb, and run your fingertips
over its nap, which is shorter
than peach fuzz, closer to chamois” ...

And shall we waste such luminous rust,
“tawny gold with a blush on its cheeks...
an apricot...the color of shaman and dawn”
as fructifications do spoil in the lea
“to offset [each] savage wistfulness of early spring.”

Then will we praise every dawning
that promises spring? Ripeness is all,
someone once wrote without looking back,
so let each bell chime the shells of our days
until every stroke is recalled.

[29-30 April 1998; rev-1. 12-3/98; rev-2: 12/13/98]

Upon reading “The Consolation of Apricots” by Diane Ackerman, in the book of poems I Praise My Destroyer, Copyright @ 1988 by Diane Ackerman, Random House. The parts in cursive (and/or quotation marks) appearing in my poem are direct quotations from the poem by Ackerman.

AGAIN YOUR SOUL IS ON ICE
for Eldridge Cleaver, 1936-1998

It’s Beltaine for Celts on that side of light
and it’s "cinquo de Mayo" for some Amerindians
this first day of May which slammed like a fist
on your time. Today, the newspapers
announced that you’ re gone. Causes unknown.
I never met you but knew how your mind
(maybe like mine) kept slipping on ice. How else
stay alive in this circus at home, dear soul amerika?

You roped those who raped, trapped as they
trapped, bled as we bled, frightened by love.
But still you loved, oh yes how you loved...
And how well shall we cope
with our tragic ingestion of hate?
They work within, you scratch from outside
looking in, working out, trying somehow
to get back in, Black Panther: your darkness
will not come to daylight. How can we learn
to copy the man when he said let there be light
from out of this dark, yet not as two fevers
that fight for dominion, not Cain
and Abel, not virgin or whore
but like Yin and Yang
two halves together, one blinding sight?

Your heart is on ice, constricted by life
to atomised cells that chill every night; where
are they now these martyrs, these men? Gone,
gone, they are wind-flowers that lilt every spring.
And yet they return, they return, yes they return...

(2 May 1998)




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