Grief too has the property of the skin – Poems by Viviana Fiorentino

Road lines*

 

You, mother, driving, me at your side -, we talk as I watch
edges

aligning with the road. Fragments of landscape in dots of trees and shrubs. You speak
softly

of ending and loss. I turn to the other window, rain falling in the other direction,
out

where the wind tilts things with no attention. To you mother, who
I  love,

I talk of bags I forgot, and the books I haven’t read. Yet rain falls
faster

in lines slanting the world underneath. Coincidences have weight. I wanted to
tell you

– while you talk of deities’ pity for us, your fate, my chance, our possibilities –

but you want to pay for those parcels I forgot. You won’t turn into
slip roads

we could take. And while you point
where air scatters

more light, for the sky kindness or the sun obstinacy,
edges

align between us. Love for you. The weight of your

heart
before I feel it.

 

Impossible crossroads where you and I are mother.

 

*included in print in Issue 43 of The Blues Nib

 

Landing*

i

Sky, you are too big;
Persian Blue –
I cannot know you.

ii
Instead, I call on you, Land;
give me a place to put my feet,
a home for my uncertainty,
a place to doubt.

iii
A place to live.

 

*This poem is part of a bilingual project in Italian and English and appeared in the ‘Writing Home’ anthology by Dedalus Press. Texts have been co-written in the two languages by me and poet Maria McManus.

 

An Encounter*

 

You ask me
why is the sky
open and without limits
for swans, for geese, for terns
but not for us.

Here, we cannot even see the sky;
this room is suffocating,
hot, without windows,
strip lights cast shadows
of our hands across this table.

Like birds
we are trapped
and disorientated
in white light
milling
crying out into the dark.

Left to our own instincts
we could find our way
on cool nights
navigating
with the stars
the coastline
landmarks.

 

 

Fingerprint

Border. Mark of a finger. Impressed – the birth of a breath and a question of the brain
(they are the same).

Grief too has the property of the skin,
it heals from the centre, it stamps concentric circles.

 

A fragile finger can trace the erasing of a self.

 

 

Between land and sea*

The harbour, a safe passage from sea to land

 

Night
iron oxide stains
dark
cadmium sulphide,
mercury,
and the colour of the sky
colour Cassel Earth
deep peat,
crumbled.

 

Migrating underground.

 

The eyes know petrels, above
they fly miles over sky paths.

 

Here we are blind (yet we know the way).

Here we breathe through the skin (yet we hold hope).

Divided between two continents, we name the sea distance (because the body
remembers each breakage in the bones).

 

Migrating underground.

While the night is a road

pointing towards  what we desire.

 

We rise from

under water, underground,

in a skin tight envelop

we emerge.

 

This is our law

to be free and imagine

 

miles above our heads            yet swans and petrels

are flying.

 

 

* 10.6.18, the Italian Home Office Minister prevented the Aquarius, capacity 500, from docking. 630
migrants, including more than 100 children and people tortured in North Africa, were on board.