Nothing is more beautiful than a table full of crazy poets
– Jack Hirschman
I’m reading your poems
and a huge ramshackle building appears, the light from a hundred candles
spills out on the snow. Inside at the long table Bolsheviks built
like fireplugs hammer out their arguments with Dostoevsky youths
and socialists from a score of countries.
The blue black skin of the Tuareg singer gleams with Saharan
constellations as he sings the language of the wind,
the one his mother taught him, the one forbidden in school.
Poets groped together lift their glasses of grappa and sing along.
At the far end, intellectuals cozy up over the finer points, the hidden
references and underlying themes, somebody licks his fingers.
The South American woman with the voice of a train wailing
through small towns of the disappeared leans in toward
the Sikh and his syllables of Guru Nanak.
The Siberian shamaness creates in her song a mask of knotted
string through which we watch the procession of animals over
the northern vastland. A courtship dance of apples begins at dawn.
Three youths with a shrieking soundtrack shout simultaneous
personal histories of the horrors of war.
There’s something about the cavernous heart
where all songs gather,
Bella Ciao, the Internationale, the jazz riff and the lullaby
the drama of hands over a table among the deaf and the singing.
The key is in the diamond in the door,
Open up it’s me.
In the poem that holds the door ajar,
Ahh, we’ve been waiting.
Voce: Janine Pommy Vega
Musicisti: Marco Collazzoni (sax), Riccardo Morpurgo (piano), Luca Colussi (batteria), Almir Nežic (basso).
Incontri internazionali di Sarajevo, 2003.
