*****
Eugenio Montale: Poem
THE HOUSE AT OLGIATE
after Montale
It was another time, your little Tonino
still with you, and you in the high house
by the overpass. I would pick it out often,
that house, from the freeway, knowing nothing
of him, or of you, nor did my heart miss a click,
as later, as now. In that not-knowing our future
hid its hand: just so far the wires thread back
from tomorrow, then rupture.
How many years on did you let me in?
Your boy had long died (whispering
“Mama, it’s for you that it hurts”),
but I knew then your gardener, your kitchen garden,
your stripped teenage den – on the wall
a just visible shadow where a mirror had reigned.
I was wordless: in those rooms the least
breathing trace of you thralled me.
Much later, your goldfinch has warbled its last
in the shade of the tiger-lily I nurtured and left here.
Starved of any breath of you I stall before
squares of cabbage, old clumps of dust-freckled dahlias,
the custodian shuffling after me, no less bereft,
through wan corridors to your converted loft
where only the old moan of the cars seeps up
impervious through the gummy air.
And so our destinies ravelled, my lioness,
while you peered through smoked lenses
at refractory clouds, or down at spilt swirls
of detergent in the scummy Olona.
And unravel: your house in Friuli, unseen,
looms huge in my longing, the barns
where your childhood once ran at the future
full-tilt (even then!), and took wing.
Philip Morre lives in Venice, where he works as a translator. For roughly the first decade of the century he ran Old World Books, a secondhand and antiquarian bookshop in the Ghetto. He has published two full-length collections of poetry, The Sadness of Animals (2012) and Istantaneo di ippopotamo con banane/Snapshot of Hippo with Bananas (bilingual, 2019), and a number of pamphlets.
*****
Salvatore Quasimodo: Poem
From the Fortress of Bergamo Alta
You heard the cock-crow in the air,
coming from the other side of the ramparts
beyond the towers frozen in unfamiliar light –
the lightning crowing of life and the whisper
of voices in the cells, and the pre-
dawn chorus of the guard patrol.
And you did not speak up for yourself:
now you were in the beam of a passing spotlight
and the antelope fell silent and the heron
was lost in an exhalation of foul smoke –
talismans of a world barely able to be born.
And the February moon passed by
beaming on the earth: but for you it is the shape
of memory, moulding itself to its silence.
You, too, go now, among the cypresses
of the Rocca without a sound; and here,
anger at the unripeness of dead youth
is so calm; pity, at arms-length, is almost joy.
Mike Farren’s poems have appeared in journals such as Stand, 14 Magazine and The Interpreter’s House. He has won several competitions, including Poem of the North (2018 – ‘canto’ winner), the Ilkley Literature Festival Poetry Competition (2020) and the Red Shed Competition (2023). His pamphlets are Pierrot and his Mother (Templar), All of the Moons (Yaffle) and Smithereens (4Word). He is part of Yaffle Publishing team and one of the hosts of Shipley’s ‘Rhubarb’ open mic.
The High Window 