.
On high the fables blaze
The aurora australis came and went
It was lost in the past
Ungaretti
You lasted
Wherever you are read now
a searchlight beacon reaches
into fog
Born in the shade of the beam of
the great lighthouse
of Alexandria
you knew the hard
Egyptian stars
twenty years
before you set foot
on the factual shore
of Italy
to begin
a pilgrimage
in silence
at night
in the dark
over mountains
deserts
fragmented bodies
On high the fables blaze
at the first hint of a breeze
they'll flutter to earth
with the leaves
but when the wind picks
up again
there will be a new star
in the southern sky
When you were old and silvery and raging
You wrote You were shattered
At eighty
you gave
Ed Sanders
one of your pubic hairs
to sell to speculators
to pay the costs
of his poetry magazine
At that same time
Ted Berrigan
was constructing an homage to you
deliberately mistranslated
Tootin' My Horn on Duty
Giuseppe
Your poetry burned out of your soul
by the suffering around you
in the most horrible of wars
remains as hard as bits of stars
When I think about you now
I always remember that
under the Southern Cross’s wild conflagration
your father
helped build
the Suez Canal
Giuseppe Ungaretti, c. 1915 (photographer unknown)
Aurora australis and Southern Cross, viewed from Dunedin, New Zealand: photo by James Dignan, 2006
2 comments:
Tom, thanks for this on Ungaretti--a poet I know too little about. And I've been in an Italian mood lately, too, watching Visconti's The Damned and The Leopard. Both are marvelous, but the latter really was something--and is based, as I'm sure you know, on the novel by Lampedusa. Anyway, thanks for this--I'll look up Ungaretti's work.
Dale,
Thanks. The vision is not what it was so reading is not easy but with Ungaretti, no problem. To paraphrase Joe Tex, skinny lines and all. I find I can read him in my mind, no book, as on desert island. Immensity/illuminates me!
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