> Wonder if anybody else would be interested in a project of poems
> on saints (lives or texts, canonized or de-nominated therefore, or
> thoroughly disreputable candidates of one's own) -Candice
Erminia Passannanti
"The blackberry way of thorns"
For those slow hours in which
you've known the waiting for martyrdom
on steps of earth as of those
sacrificed as virgin - you,
I say to you, who with tender fingers
touched the sores of a leper
and hid your hair under a coarse cloth
to bend yourself in mercy
over that body in agony that -
according to thy word - throbbed the more,
for those hours, I offer you the rose,
sole spectator among so many empty chairs
once dead her spirit in front of me
and the limbs I saw writhing in air
and the wound pulsing to gush
there where her relics
cup to hold the blood
Come this way -
it's struck, the way of briars,
her imagination -
Here are the stones, here the thicket of thorn
that supported the stake
and just down there, for that beautiful saint,
admire how the briar at her feet shaped itself
to form a cross
I herself remained possessed with a delirium of voices
and gladly I would bare my breast
and make myself wander aimlessly
until someone should lead me back home
light'ningly, transported as in a winged dream coming from the core,
the ascension to the sky in the sign of a. sword:
I recognized Chien there, his coin nimble, I saw the stems of shadows
And the water and the fire- or virgin root
a further time it burned me up, not understanding how,
a disparagement of the world.
(Here is a first poem for Candice's new project on saints. The subject is -
for me -
most appealing, being an Italian Roman Catholic. It is about Saint Joan d'
Arc.I have written a whole series of poems on Saints which by now almost
sums up to a treatise of Martirology (or Martyr's calendar)
(wrote in 1993 - appeared in two lit. magazine and now is published within
my sec. collection Macchina (Manni Editore, June 2000)
Anyway, the translation from the original text "Il sentiero delle more" is
by British poet Peter Dale.)
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