from Death Will Come and Will Wear Your Eyes
11
The gleam of dawn
breathes with your voice
at the end of empty streets.
Grey light your eyes,
sweet drops of dawn
on the dark hills.
Like dawn wind
your step and your breath
flood the houses.
The town shudders,
the stones reek –
you are life, the awakening.
[20 March 1950]
13
Death will come and will wear your eyes –
the death that is with us
from morning to evening, sleepless,
deaf, like an old regret
or an absurd vice. Your eyes
will be a futile word,
a cry kept silent, a silence.
Thus you see them every morning
when alone you stoop over yourself
in the mirror. O dear hope,
that day we too will know
that you are life and nothingness.
Death keeps an eye on each of us.
Death will come and will have your eyes.
It will be like giving up a vice,
like watching a dead face
re-emerge in the mirror,
like listening to closed lips.
We will go down into the vortex mute.
[22 March 1950]
15
I will pass by Piazza di Spagna
It will be a clear sky.
Streets will open
on the hills with pines and stones.
The turmoil of the streets
won’t change that stillness in the air.
The flowers sprayed
with colour will make eyes
at the fountains like amused
women. The stairs
the balconies the swallows
will sing of the sun.
That street will open,
the stones will sing,
the heart will beat shaking
like fountain water –
this will be the voice
that will climb your stairs.
The windows will know
the smell of the stone and of
morning air. A door will open.
The turmoil of the streets
will be the turmoil of your heart
in the lost light.
It will be you – still and clear.
[28 March 1950]
Marco Sonzogni is the Editor of Translation Ireland and of College Green, and edited Or volge l’anno – At the Year’s Turning. An Anthology of Irish Poets Responding to Leopardi (1998). He teaches Italian at niversity College Dublin.
David Wheatley is a lecturer in English at the University of Hull, a critic and a poet. Two collections of his poetry, Thirst and Misery Hill, were published by Gallery Press.
Translated by Marco SonzogniDavid Wheatley
Page(s) 124-126
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