Poetry by Giovanna Campo.


Saving Private Ryan
(I'm his mother)

From the wound
cold blood gushes out,
like from a fountain,
it gurgles
plentiful up to the point that you ask yourself
how a single organism
can produce so much of it,
for then
you throw it outside
with so much indifference
the eyes half-shut
the distracted breath,
the abandoned hands.
While on the other side
of the screen heart in throat
you would want to cry out to him
Fix the wound
now, strongly,
don't let it
slide away,
this river
of blood
from your,
from our,
life


Rescue at sea

Come take me
before I disappear
in the last stream

if I open the eyes
you see
it's me
shoulders burnt
the breast
still full


And now you'd want the fruits...

And now you would want the fruits
of my autumn tree,
you who spent whole seasons
in your malignant game
undressing me of gems and buds.
The low branches by now
are sticks, withered leaves.
The fruits are up,
in the arms of foliage,
to the sun, to the sky,
where you have never been,
where you don't know how to get to


Hands

The right hand takes care
of what is rational
it is straight, well behaving
it has a privileged connection
with the left hemisphere of conscious thought.
On the tip of its fingers
pragmatism, truths,
tangible facts,
everything, you say,
it's not for me.

Perhaps you are right.
it's the other one my hand,
inexact, hindered, unforeseeable,
undisciplined.
Sometimes it would write - think! -
even backward,
good as it is
only
to the lateral thought
of intuition.


Fishing

And in the morning one returns
burdened and tired,
the swollen eyelids, disembarks
from the white drift bedsheets
on the terraferma.
And still they wriggle in the nets,
of quicksilver
the dreams.

Write them down right away,
or
render them to the sea.

copyright Giovanna Campo, translation by MW