by Guido Monte
Multilingual Poetry
"... our ethical duty is not to put on spotless clothes.
If it's necessary, we must also dirty them:
for example, by binding up a wound or cleaning a floor."
—Claudio Magris, Se non siamo innocenti (2011)
graffiamenti © 2011 Silvia Spacca |
(Swans - March 12, 2012)
âhad: when i wake up every morning
walcott is my homeric hero,
and the caribbeans my promised land
also if i have never been there,
my mind sails
among white almonds,
islands' bays and no pain,
between ancestral gods
travelling along oceans,
and smiles of poor islanders
as dead people' gifts,
the slaves
seems free now.
itr: just in time for lunch, however
here's the alda merini's shadow
that calls me on the entry phone
telling me she's an angel
of disease,
she comes upstairs
and shows me scars,
pills-poison and
abandoned animals' photos
she calls me slowly and
elle me demande la raison
pour laquelle tout le monde
so many people
lui a demandé de connaître le moyen
de mourir le plus tôt possible
et rien plus, to know the way
for dying as soon as possible,
ainsi, sans y songer.
tlota: at night j'allume la lampe
de mon bureau and flip through
pasternak's verses, des vers
de silences et de neige,
shehr haye sokoot va barf
of an already old time
going away, of winter ceilings
and sidewalks,
d'une branche fleurie,
la dernière, dans la nuit blanche
in the white darkness.
(hamsha, shetta, shuba...
ad infinitum)
The author thanks Silvia Dello Russo, Alberto Antinoro, Giusy Chirco, Francesca Saieva, Nahid Rachlin (Persian translation).
ahad, itr, tlota, shuba... are a sequence of Aramaic numbers.
picture: graffiamenti, by Silvia Spacca (2011).
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Guido Monte on Swans (with bio). Also, please check Guido's entry on Wikipedia. (back)