INSCRIBED ON A GRAVESTONE, PERHAPS
Here far from everyone the sun beats down
on your caps and rekindles the honey in you,
and already the last cicada of summer
remembers us alive from its shrub,
and the siren that howls its profound
alarm over the Lombard plain.
o
burnt voices of the wind, what do you want?
Tedium still rises from the earth.
MAN OF MY TIME
You are still that creature of the stone and sling,
man of my time. You were in the fuselage,
with the malicious wings, the sun-dials of death
-I've seen you-in the flame-throwing tank, on the gallows,
on the rack. I've seen you: you were,
with your exact science bent on extermination,
without love, without Christ. You have killed again
as always, as your fathers killed, as the animals
who saw you for the first time used to kill.
And this blood smells as in the day
when one brother said to the other:
"Let's go into the fields." And that cold, tenacious echo
has come subtly to you within your day.
Forgotten, 0 sons, the clouds of blood
risen from the earth, forgotten the fathers:
their graves sink in the ashes,
the blackbirds, the wind cover their heart.
Salvatore Quasimodo
(Translated from the Italian by Charles Guenther)
