THE POEM

The Celestial City by Luigi Fontanella

For Pascal D’Angelo

and for all the Italian immigrants in America

These places have been your pathways,

those struggle-hopes our pains,

seen from the shore the ocean is different

than when seen from a boat.

These places have been your windmills.

We didn’t go on that voyage:

it took us away, when for the traveler

the near and the far disappear.

These places have been our sighs,

the stranger in us cancelled every fate,

every Macondo. Today’s false exile

is a cohort of dreams within and without our world.

These places have been our mornings.

The floating city did not interest you

but only the heart divided between the recent past

and a future present only in the mind.

These places have been our destinies,

you, who followed the path of the sun,

unaware of what was awaiting you, starting

from a name hopelessly mispronounced.

Today these places are inside us and near,

here where everything and nothing would mix

the cards of game and need, transformed

into a pile deceit, nostalgia, dream.

(Translation by Carol Lettieri & Irene Marchegiani)

From Land of Time (2006)

Chelsea Editions, New York

New York. Statue of Liberty. Photo courtesy of Rocco Saltino

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