Wallflower

Photo by JB, 2018

 

Stock plant uses violence against silence
of the moderate stones that grasp greedy
tonight breaths of last sun on the hill.
Soon we’ll go back to Italy again
 

You’ll stay here, where you work, maybe for
a year that you’ll add to prior ones.
You’ll stay here to prepare your main hope
that is future and family: news
 

It is hard letting you could do it
like the wallflower lives on the stones
near the time marked there, on the tower
of the closed nice church. Never mind.
 

It is difficult standing apart,
son, and let you go, who knows…there
on each unknown road, you so, so new,
while we are old and heavy and closed
 

Our greatest strong prayer you are
you, together with your sister young.
May God help you to be, to be better
than I am, I who now line up rubble

 

Montferrier sur Lez, April, 4th 2018

 

Italian version

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St.Sara

 

Salicornia rounds up herself reddish
in the flat sweep expanse filled with
salt that denies greener bright hopes.
Far I see St.Marie and its church
 

Life is eaten by salt, wind and time
every year and for years, for a lot.
It sits tired in a flat backdrop
longing for something that could protrude
 

Then beyond Little Rhone, then forward
where more water this water receives,
earth is fading into a liquid nothing
wall or pass to so different worlds
 

At the seashore strong violence gives
reason to sky and sea to be roar
against rocks and the stones of the port
that protect boats and reflux and me
 

Wind and water run over impulses
to be still, to be calm and to stay
as if everything were just like no thing
and each place were the same everywhere
 

There was time when Saracens came here
from that water, now only a background.
The church was both for people and bones
of the saints a safe fortress with crenels
 

In the crypt Sara waits among hundreds
of lights and she is hope for the ones
that now own no more place or that keep
too much lands in their heart. Here I pray

 

St.Marie de la Mer, April, 3rd 2018

 

 

Italian version

Garrigue

Photo by JB, 2018

 

Grass and shrubs here devour all the light
and become lust for life and for colours
while distil fragrance into the air:
helichrysum and dreamy remembers

Buds swell fast among the sharp thorns
ripping each winter’s hard and brown scales
yellow colours spread right all around
and the heather’s flesh is purple blood
 

Oak trees show hard and prickly, strange leaves
dark and small; they are head bent so close
to the ground. Valerian lights up as it’s a red
flame and rough bindweed is slithering down
 

In the clear afternoon a strange calm
envelops me; I look at myself
into limestones corroded by years.
We were sounds and too colors. Thus once

 

St.Guilhem le Desert, April, 4th 2018

Italian version

Baux

Pic by JB 2018

 

It no longer exists, nor its rooms
nor its battlement towers. The castle
is reduced to a tourist fun chance,
its shaped stones were removed, dispersed

Still alive is the village; the white
rocks are cut and experienced again
while pine and holm trees are now the bush
calm and warm and dark green spread so much

The so powerful strength of a time,
the splendour of tapis and silk velvets,
the luxury and the glory are all faded.
They are only pale spectrum and far

As Baux does, I am often a ghost
made by hopes and illusions: past days.
I recycle my stones; they are old
as lost dreams, as a presence not true

I would like to be more, really alive
I should be what I am, what You want.
There’s a me in my shaped white heart
please discover it, please come to me

 

Baux, April, 3rd 2018

Italian version

Helichrysum smell

Photo by JB, 2018

I was twenty, oh God! Is it possible?
And I ran light across the Alps mountains
yet today a stone challenges my pride
and my feet and my mind shudder both

In the air Helichrysum and my
memories mix with rue that I sense
without see. I seek you there, below
I call you and I’m back: you are my wish

On the hill, in the scrub that wraps up
this limestone rock I go chasing times
by now lost, far away, looking for
resting boys at sunset, singing happy

Cobblestone white and flat make a path
as wide as the life history of saints[1]
who went through this Désert[2].
At the end of the world[3] we revive

Château du Verdun, April, 4th 2018

[1] Above all St. Guilhem  (William), grandson of Charles Martel, famous Christian knight and cousin of the emperor Charlemagne. He is the hero of the Chanson de Guillaume.

[2] The Château du Verdun, or Giant Castle, is located near Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert.

[3] The very impressive Cirque de l’Infernet, known as located “au bout du monde“.

Italian version

Another birthday

From the The seventh seal, by Ingmar Bergman

The time’s torment is like a deep carving
in the cruel reflection of mirrors,
it’s a spit on the glass and it steams up
every clear cut view of real world

The time falling is sunset, my time;
each mistake I did sits on a pile
of dumb cues now lost far in the past
and I worry about remaining days
 

The time sunset is like a ship stranded
where dreams crush and stub out and the eyes
wake-up to the nothing that haunts
my end and both the end of the world

March, around 14th 2018

Italian version

Black fires

Picture from here

 

I remember your eyes as two fires
even if black as black was the cape
that hid everywhere your face and the body
years ago, there, in the underground train

You seemed proud and contemptuous about
myself and all my so perverse world
too much free or perhaps I hurt you
staring at your so lovely eyes

You were Arab, maybe, anyway
from another world; you seemed me
really beautiful, so upright and sure
to be better than us, flabby and weak

I don’t know when I saw you, the year
when we met on that train, far in time.
In those days we had no fear or suspicion
about evil intention by Islam

Then the towers, the wars and the crazy
attacks made by your people … by you?
Our planet was wide at that time
now each thing changes and the Earth is so small

 

January, 16th 2018

Italian version