AS LONG AS I LIVE

As long as I live I will never forget the silence, in the subtle crust,
that you have emanated and spread around in thistles of dust,
the sour, chary, stealthy light in your gaze like a wing
which revealed what would be missed of anything.

You oozed a grey haze in the end, a dark sky, spangled with brown
with your heel taps on the polished floor where I could drown.
Your eyes, your cheekbones, all the bones of your face
are for me now stone blackened by fire or dust threads like lace,

dust floating around, lingering purposelessly before fading,
well, you too will be soon dust like me and stop treading.
But when my time comes I will want to burn in zest
and there’ll be crimson in my ashes, a crest

of rock, a tongue of flame, of memory
and desire, a gust of fiery wind
spitting into the silence
that you have been.


This poem was born in a rather complicated way: I found by chance an old Italian version of it which attracted me but which I had to revise making some changes. I liked the new Italian version and decided to translate it or rather re-write it in English and a completely new poem was born.
It is a "bitter, angry" work, an unusual kind of poem for me but I enjoyed the determination I felt in myself revising it, the rhymes came rather effortlessly. Maybe it's nothing worth but once more I had the feeling the lines were writing themselves.