“Daylight” by Antonia Pozzi, translation from Italian by Amy Newman | Blackbird v21n1

Italian
back ANTONIA POZZI
translation from Italian by Amy Newman

Daylight

It’s a white sun that softens
the bronze women on the monuments.

You’d like to disappear to the houses, wake up
where slow wagons drag
iron bars to the countryside—

because there in the ditches
children rage in the water, at dawn,
and images of poplars collapse.

To follow the dance
of an old pipe organ,
we’d run in the wind along the streets . . .

barefoot at heart
and with threadbare weights
of joy.

27 January 1938