This is a translation of one of my poems in Macchina, wrote in collaboration
by Michael Pickering, Rip Bulkley and myself, erminia passannanti:
ciao, Erminia
In Memoriam
Sad true dictation
when with my cheek against the naked earth
I saw my child covered in filth
as she ran to meet me down corridors of grass,
and the air as moist around us was
as life under the falling rain
when with my father and mother
Dreary wrecks abandoned in the meadows
of the things subtracted -
one curled on his side to rust
as if asleep in the shadow
of a breaking wave of white berries,
the other still on her feet
with a crown of holly and dwarf mallow
and her coiled secrets of the other world.
Slow snail in her cracked shell
through the concavities of which
the skies reverberates,
trapped in the sweats of autumn,
who from the earth can tell how the foot
burrows down, or how grubs hatch, unobserved.
Erminia Passananti
(trans. Rip Bulkeley)
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