SERENI, Vittorio

The window lifted you one evening

The window lifted you one evening

high above songs of the street.

Just so in the dark of indecisive years

you will remain the frequent thunder

would feign for you

horrors of a distant war.

Still I regain you at times in a sound

of chimes beyond the rain, inclined

on the first autumnal ember.

Or it was the flare of a face.

In me il tuo ricordo / Your Memory Within me

Your memory within me is only a rustle

Of bicycles which go quietly,

There, where the height of noon

Descends to the most flaming of evenings,

Between houses and gates

And the sighing slopes

Of windows open to the Summer.

Alone and distant within me is the sound

Of the lament of trains leaving,

Of souls as they depart.

And there, light as a wisp of smoke carried by the wind,

You vanish in the twilight.

La Spiaggia / The beach

They’ve gone all of them –

blathered the voce in the receiver.

And then, brash: – Never to return again.–

But today

on what was once an unfamiliar stretch of beach

those solar patches…Signals

from those who had never actually left?

And hush if you turn round, as if it’s nothing.

The dead it’s not what from day

to day goes wasted, but those

patches of inexistence, calx or ash

ready to become movement and light.

Doubt

not – the sea invests me with its strength –

they will speak.

Translation Matilda Colarossi

Le mani / De handen