Where Messina lay <br />violet upon the waters, among the mangled wires <br />and rubble, you walk along the rails <br />and switches in your islanders' <br />cock-of-the-walk beret. For three days now, <br />the earthquake boils, it's hurricane December <br />and a poisoned sea. Our nights fall <br />into the freight cars; we, young livestock, <br />count our dusty dreams with the dead <br />crushed by iron, munching almonds <br />and apples dried in garlands. The science <br />of pain put truth and blades into our games <br />on the lowlands of yellow malaria <br />and tertian fever swollen with mud. <br />Your patience, sand and delicate, <br />robbed us of fear, <br />a lesson of days linked to the death <br />we had betrayed, to the scorn of the thieves <br />seized among the debris, and executed in the dark <br />by the firing squads of the landing parties, a tally <br />of low numbers adding up exact <br />concentric, a scale of future life. <br /> <br />Back and forth your sun cap moved <br />in the little space they always left you. <br />For me, too, everything was measured <br />and I have borne your name <br />a little beyond the hatred and the envy. <br />That red on your cap was a mitre; <br />a crown with eagle's wings. <br />and now in the eagle of your ninety years <br />I wanted to speak to you -- your parting <br />signals coloured by the night-time lantern -- <br />to speak to you from this imperfect <br />wheel of a world, <br />within a flood of crowded walls, <br />far from the Arabian jasmine <br />where you are still, to tell you <br />what once I could not -- difficult <br />affinity of thoughts -- to tell you (not only <br />the marshland locust, the mstic tree can hear) <br />as the watchman of the fields tells his master: <br />'I kiss your hands.' This, nothing else. <br />Life is darkly strong.<br /><br />Salvatore Quasimodo<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/to-my-father-13/
