Photo (CC) laura.foto @ Flickr
*
Grazie Italia
For the Roman sparrow who lent us his time
As we awed at the Pope’s palace in a crowd
Of two and for our moment by the Tiber
Green as the sycamore’s fresh summer rags.
For making us sticky in the heat as we fall away
Like ash into the noisy song lit twilight
And for the wine in worn out street corners
And marble foyers grand as an aging contessa
Slipping into the dark draped across the lanes
By the glamorous and impossible canals
Of my first time Venezia, where the night
Is an insistent daydream dressed for carnivale.
For the sun that razored the cooling Tuscan air
As Firenze stared down like a pantomine
Wizard casting a spell over its sleeping riches.
For the hidden church of gilded silence
That lost us all over again between the
Tourist party palazzos and wet diamond
Fountains busking for foreign coins.
For singing opera in gondolas steered
By poor boys in borrowed shirts.
For selling me enough glass beads
And Chianti to be dazzled by myself
Grazie Italia for being the best lover
I ever had the pleasure of leaving
Behind.
And you make me wonder if we were
Ever sound in mind with our strong
Young bodies pulling us up the hill into
The arms of a legends appearing like a
Distant relative from the summer dust.
You make me want to sit in shade until
The money runs out and jump a train
Through fields of canola and sunflowers
And tiny churches blooming from the
Harvest, old as trees. You make me
……………………STOP
And walk my streets in the rain
And falling churchbells, and sleep
Til Sunday noon in the spell of black
Silk and cobbled old women in the
Squares cleared in the stone forest
For the church, and wake to the rough
Hand of the artists in the piazza
Jewelled with their work, and breathe
Damp windowsill morning dreams.
I am a bird perched on a city
Lost in its own twistings and
The symphony of living on rooftops
And it’s all free
Italy you cheap whore
Soldering hearts together
I love your hairy upper lip
And swinging hips
And impatient loving
You big armed
Hold me together
So drunk and fed
That I forget to fall
To pieces under
The accordion light
And gypsy flowers
Worshipping in the
Dust of saint’s bones
And the grinning skulls
Strung with lace
And hot prayers.
Thank you for teaching a cold
White-bellied tourist how to burn
With the midnight candles.
Grazie for breeding greedy brave sparrows
To befriend the wanderers on a bridge.
.
*
.
An afternoon with Eliot, Dante and Steinbeck
There it is – your life – in a cage of rain. Impervious
As the clouds are to your wet feet. Too slow
Too slow the bird chimes from the bricked up
Chimney with the butchered shoots
Of the sage bush in its beak as the sun
Laughs at your turned up collar.
Galled by the world into the secrets
Under the dust and horse sweat,
Hiding with the mice in the haystack.
Lost somewhere in the powdered mist
Kicked up like a curtain hem
By the feet of the Hollow Men
There is darkness and a river –
Each the other’s nightmare –
And a journey into nowhere,
Through phantoms of the streets
And old frontier truths
To find the sky on a clear night;
To find the nothing in yourself
And your loves scattered like seeds
Onto the cool field of the stars.
.
*
ABOUT THE POET
PAGE SINCLAIR was born and raised in Sydney and completed a BA at the University of Cambridge in 2013. She is currently working on her first collections of poetry.
Contrappasso Magazine: International Writing 