Rumor at the old nostalgia
Manuel Scorza
1948
Published in La Tribuna, Sunday September 5th 1948
When light grows tired of beating against the day
its golden corpse gets stranded on the docks,
and there is silence between the absent ones
and the swallows,
laying slow eggs,
does water go back to lightning's petals ?
does crystal turn to displume in the lily?
do you listen to the fall, flock after flock, land
between the ruinous springs from the west,
do you hear me arrive stomping on the smell coming from
the submerged apples, are you listening to me...?
I remember the day when the firefly
wore their ring from lost ships,
time came down to even examine your silent things.
Who remembered then dew holding
the pigeons?
who bunch of sickly planets?
who loneliness bilged by the dead?
who knife sharped in the moon?
It was the month of the waves kneeling and waiting
your crown.
It was half since the undone plumage of the afternoon,
from the tides, from the oblivion.
And now I am in the middle of the invaded months,
between the last shells of the day!;
I hear that you put on the dirty dress of a ghost,
I feel that a blind sun
rains you with water feathers, and I don't know you anymore.
Who, then, are you who eternally drains
fall with your bucket?
who do you twist your beard to the horizon?
This is the time
in which light tears off its eyelashes,
the lily shivers in lightning's dusty bed,
the bull travels overleaf the roar.
This is the time
in which to your just sifted island eyelids
rain arrives bleeding out mockingbirds.
Now the fog, they are looking!
Let's see the grass, I am not guilty
of tarnishing the landscape like a glass!
Oh, combatant, what would you say if you saw
the blaze that binds your bowels!
It is no longer possible you didn't know your fingers
emerge from the gulfs bringing here
every day a flower of petrified light!
It is no longer possible, nor I want to,
that my heart leaves
in the yellowish carriage of the leaves!
But don't weep for them.
They are perpetually built by water.
In the beginning, when the tear turns
its throne transparent, it is edified by
the wind that erases the tombs.
Have they been seen in the piers
where fall arrives,
jasmine by jasmine from the bottom of the earth?
Rise up
people don't want to believe me
that everywhere you limit with dawn,
that you are in the waterdrop where, already in ruins,
waving its arms the horizon says goodbye...