To M.W.

By Gabriella Garofalo

Hers was the sort of kindness born out of fear,
The soul was a scared lady:
Particularly when in the morning the grudge of the light
Was quite a piece of work:
No depths of an abyss for shaken souls,
They might get excited, and anyway
The swamps weren’t that dangerous-
Those problems apart, her days made the clouds blue-dust, And did justice to the blazing beings-
Maybe God in spite of everything? –
But blue was the dawn of words, when she was listening
To her myths, where even the waves are wild,
Stronger than the shocked rhythms
In a tangle of matching reds-
Meantime, for his part, the angel of secrecy,
So very sick and tired of his aging Eden,
Breaks in your house and shuts
All the blue hours in your days.
Awful, isn’t it, mainly because you have
No moors at hand, no wild grass, no stray leaves-
Just make do with your wistful stones,
A betrayed green if the water stays still-
What a foolish makeshift, what a waste of limbs,
And you’d love to swap them
With meadows, rapids, streams-
Oh, don’t I know, you look for green
As the father of every tale, but your search is tangled up,
Even words meddle in and cut up, my soul, your grip.
_____________________________________________