THE POEM

I

What would my life have been

had I remained where I was born? What dreams

would I be dreaming now? I cannot even

compare my human state

with that of a plant plucked

from its salubrious ground

and placed elsewhere under a roof for heaven.

Just as the high decree of Fate to me,

incomprehensible

my every question will forever be

to the eternal unity of all –

mountain and rock that form it,

oceans and waves that make it, clouds and sky,

and sun and light. Sunder all this – you have

erosion, desert, and abyss and night.

Yet I have ceased to be

the man I was: the roots wherefrom I sprung

are somewhere else instead. Deracinated –

is this the world that somewhat hides the grief

of one uprooted and no longer young?

What would my life be now

if I were still with my familiar trees?

II

Let me tonight be wondering about

the shape of every star –

not the unbounded magma that confounds

my human thinking that at best is doubt

nor the translucent sounds

that from the center of infinities

charge the celestial bodies near and far,

creating suns beyond the sun I know.

The shape – let me be wondering about

the shape of stars that glow,

for something tells me that I too was born

under the sign of one

formed like an ocean liner going far,

crowded with silent men called emigrants –

my ethnic star.

III

Do I regret my origins by speaking

this language I acquired? Do I renounce,

by talking now in terms of only dreams,

the sogni of my childhood? What has changed

that I had thought unchangeable in me?

Yet something’s changed – and what, I do not know.

Now every thought I think, each word I say

detaches me a little more from all

I used to love – your faces, ancient friends,

and all our phrases of so much delight

as needed no translation in my mind.

Mother, I even wonder if I am

the child I was, the little child you knew,

for you did not expect your little son

to grow apart from all that was your world,

the world that he saw first with your own eyes –

simple and untranslatable, composed

of one unclouded clarity of light.

Yet of a sudden he was taught to say

‘Mother’ for Mamma, and for cielo ‘sky’.

That every day, we lost each other. Now

I know you look at me as though I were

a little more and yet a little less

than what a son – your little child – should be.

Oh, they have taught me to translate all things –

even my very self – into some new

and old infinity of roots and boughs,

so that I wonder whether I am old

or whether I am new beneath the sky,

beneath the cielo of my long-lost land.

IV

My long-lost land was one that,

when snows enveloped it,

did not erase a sun that

still in my dream was lit.

But simple was the dream that

in all my fancy shone –

as simple as a gleam that

speaks of a sunken sun:

papier-mâché instead of

true shepherds, painted moss

for a pre-April meadow,

for living light the gloss

of crayon exercises

in every corner glued:

there, made of many sizes,

my cosmic marvel stood.

’Twas my presepe, full of

tu scendi dalle stelle –

the only song and rule of

intime cose belle.

But now my new-found land is

the western world, this new,

mysterious Atlantis

where men like me and you,

called immigrants, are silent

when Silent Night is sung

on this Manhattan Island

by people old and young,

by all save those, like me

and you, uprooted friend,

who think of Italy –

our lost presepe land.

V

Two languages, two lands, perhaps two souls?

I dare not ask these flowers I know well,

each of them making its one calyx bright.

Nor can I question that forbidding oak:

though low and long, its roots

cease at the hindrance of the nearest brook

as if abhorring alienness of ground.

Then, who will solve this riddle of my day?

Two languages, two lands, perhaps two souls...

Am I a man or two strange halves of one?

Somber, indifferent light,

setting before me with a sneer of glow,

because there is no answer to my plight

I find some solace only in this thought –

that maybe, just as this revolving earth

must not proclaim your triumph all at once,

I too must be, while waiting for my dawn,

the night of my own self.

Or maybe, just as your unbridled flame

would, undivided, scald this hemisphere

and turn it into ashes, I fulfill

my human fate by giving you, O sun,

a chance of mercy on my helpless life.

VI

Civis americanus sum: I swore

allegiance to the Flag of Fifty Stars:

long live America for ever more!

Now I belong where countless wounds and scars

create a morning and an epic song

that neither time nor silence ever mars.

Now, only now for every suffered wrong

do I discover who I am at last –

the multitudinous Italian throng.

I am the present for I am the past

of those who for their future came to stay,

humble and innocent and yet outcast.

I am the dream of their eternal day –

the dream they dreamed in mines bereft of light –

I am their darkness and their only ray,

their silence and their voice: I speak and write

because they dreamed that I would write and speak

about their unrecorded death and night.

O glory! I’m the bread they came to seek,

the vine they planted to outvanquish doom,

their most majestic and enduring peak.

For this my life their death made ample room.

From Gente mia and other poems (1978)