Yusuf
Yusuf is sitting next to his mother, his body lying faceup in the field.
Sunshine’s carving his
childlike gaze.
In the morning lightening in the sky, a blast:
perhaps a thunderstorm, but no rain
melting the soil into endless dark rivulets.
War deletes the borders of sense.
Perhaps it was a game, his mother had been sleeping
for hours, her arms folded on her belly
and wouldn't wake up.
And the black chasm had swallowed
the poor things of home.
Yusuf still doesn't know, his father
and his brother killed far away
beyond the dunes of blood
from sunrise to sunset.
His mother had been telling
tales of love, tales of peace.
Yusuf is now waiting for her Voice.
Poetry
Sometimes words are eyes
gazing at the world aslant.
Deep down they dig
different perspectives.
Sometimes, however, words
hover in mid air
and fail to reach
into the corners of life.
And verse is dust
in a beam of light.
Living things
Memories are waves
devouring the mind’s sand
coming back without shape
to an ocean of remembrance.
We’re just memories on the horizon
in living things alive.
(from the book “La Presenza Viva Delle Cose - Living
Things”, Puntoacapo, 2020)
Author’s Bionote:
* Laura Garavaglia is a poet, translator, journalist, founder and
president of “La Casa della Poesia di Como ODV”, director of the International
Poetry Festival “Europa in versi” in Italy, which has been held in Como for years with
events also in Milan. Her poems are also included in numerous Italian and
foreign anthologies, as well as in Italian and foreign literary journals,
websites and blogs. He is a member of
various important international bodies and associations, including the PEN Club
of Italy and Switzerland and the European Academy of Sciences, Arts and
Literature (Paris), the Tomitana Academy. His poems are translated into several
languages. He edits the foreign poetry series “Altri Incontri” for Stefano
Donno's I Quaderni del Bardo Edizioni and has translated contemporary
Hungarian, Kosovar, Korean and Vietnamese poets from English and the Ukrainian
poet Dmytro Chystiak from French. She has edited several anthologies of poetry.
She is invited to many international poetry festivals (Romania, North Macedonia,
Montenegro, Kosovo, Spain, Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, Denmark, Germany, Morocco,
Vietnam, Japan, Korea, Colombia, Mexico, USA, etc.). For her cultural activity
at an international level and her poems, she has received numerous important
prizes in Italy and abroad, including an Honorary Degree at the Higher
Education Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. For more details please visit: www.lauragaravaglia.it
(Photo: Bill
Wolak)
