Sant’Alessio, Roma
Roman swallows
swallows of the Aventina,
you fly here and there,
eyelids tightly furled
in a scowl. For ages I’ve known
that all creatures with wings are blind,
and that’s why birds cry, ‘O Lord!’
in a more human voice than ours.
You fly here and there,
who knows where from, where to,
where to, where from, who knows,
past the branches of orange and stone-pine . . .
The fugitive returns to his parents’ house
like water to a deep old well.
No, not everything is lost,
not everything vanishes.
That, “what’s the use of it?”
That, “oh what does it matter?”
That something even a mother, a wife
will never find out – that won’t disappear.
How good to know, in the end,
how good it is, that everything
people want, people beg for,
everything they’d give their all for
turns out not to matter at all.
So no-one recognised it? How could they?
After all, what does last?
Nothing but putrefying flesh and bones,
bones bleached dry, as in the valley of Jehoshaphat.
Translated by Catriona Kelly
Page(s) 180-181
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