Neither Socrates, nor Aristotle – not even
Plato – knows that in the contemporary folio
a word, given a sail and a wind, corresponds
to a migrant setting out from his homeland.
Since this era threatens
the civilisation of Adam and Eve,
my heart is aflame and exhales
these fractured lines that I send to a friend.
And the word – my pride, my fate and my title –
knows Socrates
was no migrant from his homeland,
and neither was Plato,
nor Aristotle
I am sitting by the shop window. . .
– Thanks, Marriott!
The gloomy, excited crowd passes by
and recalls to me Goya’s blackest period
and the lethargic mind that begat monsters.
They are acclaiming one whom they acknowledge
as their Leader
and they wish to erect a statue to him
in finest Carrara marble.
Those of the hairy monobrows encircled Hellas,
a land where the poet can find no place.
When once we believed In Vino Veritas,
now provincial arrogance has descended
upon the Georgian language.
For both wine and slogans
deteriorate in transit, lose their zest.
So the French hand writes
in the Village Priest’s Diary, as he must.
There’s a protest in the city and another traffic jam.
The opponents of culture fire back in revenge.
I see them lined up, masked, each in his role
. the monarchist!
– the proletarian!
– the patriot!
– the liberal!
– It’s obscene, the affair of the writer and his homeland,
with the media broadcasting the public’s tears . . .
Fellini’s Rimini flickers on my screen,
showing childhood outshines the long shadow of Nazism.
With the title of Knight of the Order of Sea Spray
a seagull screams on our native strand
that a word
plus a sail
and the wind
corresponds to a migrant setting out
from his homeland.
If grace has taken wing and flown,
how can I chase it now?
Who needs anyway an honest line laid bare?
In my poem, the angel –
forgive me, Renaissance –
has neither a child’s soft face
nor curls of hammered gold.
I do not sketch the desert hermit
with his battle-trained eagle.
for I do not know the icon’s rules.
Down a familiar street, like a stranger,
I entice an angel on with a single verse.
And I can tell – a pirate of the unsaid phrase –
whenever my writing desk begins to shake.
Then I present my guest
to my friends gathered here…
This is my Angel,
treat him with all care.
I think – that should we sit,
his wings will surely get In the way.
I recall Maestro Abbado . . .
and Iean over and look
in the toastmaster’s little notebook.
Then I stand and propose my salute.
Perhaps the angel himself
longs for his wings to disappear,
to trade the wide freedom of the sky
for a neat line on his CV . . .
and bestow his heart on some beguiling acrobat,
as Wender’s angel did under Berlin’s shaking skies.
Thus, in trust, he lends his wings to the poet
that we may waste no more time
and allow a single ray of the poet’s mission
to rise and illuminate
beloved icons dimmed by kisses and by years.
I’ll pluck the tightened sensors of the age
and offer an aria to a modern libretto.
If, dear reader, you’ll forsake
your armchair and the tv’s glow
then, through a line of verse that opens
as in a stonework wall, a hidden door,
with my poem, I’ll lead you through.
Here words are heard – untethered, bare,
while some groan their verses in the air
and some find joy in lines they weave
and in rhythms only they believe.
And I, with one cracked line, would send
a sense of God – or of His end.
No salty speech, no sugared art
has ever ruled my mind or heart,
yet if the Heavens lend me wings
I’ll try to show the truth time brings
that God is here, in every breath –
or maybe, that God has left.
And should a mighty vision come to me—
of Angelo Merisi, master as no other is—
for Baroque alone cannot explain
how he set light in darkness with his hand,
I turn to Tenebrism’s burning art,
for rhyme and metre are but backdrop to the Word—
your meaning and his meaning, if I scrawl
with charcoal on the wall, and weave
a polyphony of speech,
then even the Union itself
may start a dialogue with us.
And a word
plus a sail,
and the wind . . .
my purpose and my intention—
if you wish, my grand award,
and the title
to which risk clings—
is this:
that I stand
exactly as a migrant stands
but in my own homeland.
