Brilliant. I appreciate that poem one hell of a lot, Frederick.
Andrew
On 30/01/2008, Frederick Pollack <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> In Rome
>
>
> The caretaker of the Military Cemetery
> across the Via Zabaglia
> from the Accatolica, where Keats, Shelley,
> Gramsci, etc. are buried,
> can tell you interesting stories
> if you buy him a few drinks
> after his shift, or on a Sunday
> when the heat is great and the traffic slightly subdued.
> He says his charges have their moods.
> Normally satisfied
> with their well-watered lawn, the neat ranks of their graves,
> the shade of the concrete hand with its broken sword,
> they are uneasy when visited;
> collectively upset by ancient wives,
> unfamiliar sons and daughters, unknown grandkids.
> It isn't that they're unfeeling, but their ideas
> of comfort, presence, peace are not those
> of the living. Their perceptions
> are, we would say, blurred. The touring
> schoolchildren who occasionally come
> do not appear to them as bored for life,
> slaves of themselves, but as polite,
> lovely, attentive archetypes
> who nonetheless hear nothing and feel
> no ghostly caress. No more than a tree,
> the caretaker says, do his friends
> regard themselves as rooted and motionless;
> and although these particular dead
> are male, they see action,
> rather as women do, as someone coming
> to them. Perhaps the Gestapo officer
> who shot so many of them, prisoners,
> in the head. And perhaps he does come
> from wherever he lies to the north,
> reluctantly, in horror
> of their illogical welcome, their forgetfulness
> his torment. But they are haunted by the living,
> as if by incipient earthquake; like the cats,
> their familiars. He seems reluctant to say more,
> the caretaker, and you ask him
> if it's only the military dead
> who stir thus. And he says
> he has heard similar reports
> from the staff across the street, where poets lie.
>
--
Andrew
http://hispirits.blogspot.com/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aburke/
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