Only the song of a long night remains
between curls of waves on the pillow
and on the fingers, crushed, edges of heart.
A flash of life contracts in the blood,
shorten the time
the flounce of a skirt.
A vertigo in the rattle of time
the snow was melting above my chin,
the uncertainty was hell in the bones.
We were the Orient in a room
under a hump of an advancing moon
beheading the word on the altar.
The silence burned more than the fire,
you distributed the anxiety diagonally,
the rhythms shuffled like cards,
fever you returned with a blood without a body.
You melted my shadow hair
uncertain as the sun among the clouds,
your love in my chest calmed down.
Life was walking with death
and at every stumble the blood encrusted
chained to the form of horror,
gangrene inside a bride's heart.
In the quarrel of a rhyme it was revealed
the word in love more than fire.
Stars rained down in the night's furrow
and a moon gem hurt me.
Your fabric is an armed net
and yet I resist, living word,
in the clotted blood of this vein,
the oblivion of time sets the scene.
Spread out on a sheet of papyrus,
unseen and unheard,
I was neither dead nor rusty –
like a leaf on the ground and without a goal
in the embrace of the dawn
sprouting I felt the blood from the stone.
Having closed the door, I opened my heart wide,
shoveled snow under branches of gall
in the frozen blue inside the river.
I was walking through paths of words
with a sleeping bag and a stone for a pillow.
In the crater of the water a song swam,
the thunder ignited the quarrel
and you displayed a booty of wounds.
A fossil appeared tomorrow,
where the evil began to re-grow:
teach me how to die!
Among imaginary rooms you are the moon,
I, a tear hanging from a pin.
The present is the past of tomorrow,
humanity breaks like a diphthong.
The spectre of silence is your absence,
but there is no crying that can clear the conscience.
The magic of that night elevates us to God:
the skin grooves on the hands,
the wax melting between your fingers.
A candle flame stunned
it cancelled the blindness of the heart.
If you were death I would follow you.
A blade of grass appears from the crevasse,
the rhyme still rests in the notebook,
in the flowerbed the nail of winter emerges.
The branches were screaming, they seemed like creatures
anchored to a darkness of light,
the evening was eager for prayers.
Everything was lost against time.
Death silently offered his milk.
©Maria Teresa Liuzzo
Translate by Rasim Mas
between curls of waves on the pillow
and on the fingers, crushed, edges of heart.
A flash of life contracts in the blood,
shorten the time
the flounce of a skirt.
A vertigo in the rattle of time
the snow was melting above my chin,
the uncertainty was hell in the bones.
We were the Orient in a room
under a hump of an advancing moon
beheading the word on the altar.
The silence burned more than the fire,
you distributed the anxiety diagonally,
the rhythms shuffled like cards,
fever you returned with a blood without a body.
You melted my shadow hair
uncertain as the sun among the clouds,
your love in my chest calmed down.
Life was walking with death
and at every stumble the blood encrusted
chained to the form of horror,
gangrene inside a bride's heart.
In the quarrel of a rhyme it was revealed
the word in love more than fire.
Stars rained down in the night's furrow
and a moon gem hurt me.
Your fabric is an armed net
and yet I resist, living word,
in the clotted blood of this vein,
the oblivion of time sets the scene.
Spread out on a sheet of papyrus,
unseen and unheard,
I was neither dead nor rusty –
like a leaf on the ground and without a goal
in the embrace of the dawn
sprouting I felt the blood from the stone.
Having closed the door, I opened my heart wide,
shoveled snow under branches of gall
in the frozen blue inside the river.
I was walking through paths of words
with a sleeping bag and a stone for a pillow.
In the crater of the water a song swam,
the thunder ignited the quarrel
and you displayed a booty of wounds.
A fossil appeared tomorrow,
where the evil began to re-grow:
teach me how to die!
Among imaginary rooms you are the moon,
I, a tear hanging from a pin.
The present is the past of tomorrow,
humanity breaks like a diphthong.
The spectre of silence is your absence,
but there is no crying that can clear the conscience.
The magic of that night elevates us to God:
the skin grooves on the hands,
the wax melting between your fingers.
A candle flame stunned
it cancelled the blindness of the heart.
If you were death I would follow you.
A blade of grass appears from the crevasse,
the rhyme still rests in the notebook,
in the flowerbed the nail of winter emerges.
The branches were screaming, they seemed like creatures
anchored to a darkness of light,
the evening was eager for prayers.
Everything was lost against time.
Death silently offered his milk.
©Maria Teresa Liuzzo
Translate by Rasim Mas