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TESTAMENT NO. 1
trans. the poet


the world as a disaster
a catalogue of phenomenal effects
those roses that belonged to you
the body of a diachrony
a mouth on to an infernal cavity

Purgatory of Paradise
for your contemporaries
glory of the tongue
and - therefore - labour

I was a Gospel to my father
he was my Moses
we practised fasting to death
and my mother was our ivy
I crossed the waters

our lives were in the hands
of our sisters
and our brothers
yet we no longer believed in gaiety
- that implies a religious urge

oh, my daughter
set in the middle
of such useless debate
flower born on a mossy rock
my rhetorical negative
you live
since you survived

hope of those who cannot love us
and whom we do not love
in this black Europe
of past boundaries

you want me never to forget
and I never shall

flower, or perhaps voice
of our times
who renounced talking
who renounced listening
who gathered all her cells
and watched for days
those stormy trees behind the window
frame

sandy rose in a theatre of words
abandoned
to reason and redemption.




Erminia Passannanti 2001