PASOLINI, Pier Paolo


The Day of My Death

In a city, Trieste or Undine

along an avenue bordered by linden trees

in spring when the leaves

change color

I will fall dead

under a burning noonday sun

my eyes closing upon

the sky and its splendor.

Beneath the mild green of the lindens

I will sink into the

black of my death

parting from the sun and the leaves.

Beautiful young boys

will run in the light

I will now have lost

streaming from their schools

curls on their brows.

I will still be young,

in a bright shirt,

my hair tender in the rain

falling on the bitter dust.

I will still be warm

and a child running on the

soft asphalt of the avenue

will come and rest his hand

on my crystal loins.


Song of Church Bells

Evening at twilight entwines

amidst fountains

and my village takes shelter

in reticent colors.

I recall from a far distance the humming

of frogs, the moon, the sad cries

of the crickets.

Rosario’s singing slowly diminishes

across the fields while

to the sounds of church bells I die.

Stranger, you need not fear

my genial dash across the plains:

I am the spirit of love

returned to my village from faraway.


Little Nocturnal Poems

I

It has no foundation, this emptiness

brought by the new season

submitted to an unknown force

where reason, assailed,

gives relief to animal senses

awakened in new spaces.

Here we feel ourselves somewhat

necessary, seized again

so that this wing, warm, enables

us to see the vanity in any sign

which would insist on our remaining unrecognized

and to see far off a true human time.

IV

Mysterious lightness

of the dead weight of what

is now life, candor

of a blemished heart…

Whose feelings are like lace

after midnight

when a prostitute,

mute, silent, returns home

It is truly there,

the wind of inner life

which never slackens,

and the monotonous variation

of feelings: now,

happy, who knows why,

(for nothing, or even more

like a prostitute

I come back from

a hopeless night of roaming)

burning gloriously

with life: prey to forces

now living, now spent

Poem for Ninetto I

Your place was at my side,

and you were proud of this.

But, sitting with your arm on the steering wheel

you said, “I can’t go on. I must stay here, alone.”

If you remain in this provincial village you’ll fall into a trap.

We all do. I don’t know how or when but you will.

The years that comprise a life vanish in an instant.

You are quiet, pensive. I know it is love

that is tearing us apart.

I have given you

all the power of my existence,

yet you are humble and proud, obeying a destiny

that wants you to remain impoverished. You don’t know

hat to do, whether to give in or not.

I can’t pretend your resistance

doesn’t cause me pain.

I can see the future. There is blood on the sand.


I am a force of the Past

I am a force of the Past.

My love lies only in tradition. 

I come from the ruins, the churches,

the altarpieces, the villages

abandoned in the Appennines or foothills

of the Alps  where my brothers once lived.

I wander like a madman down the Tuscolana,

down the Appia like a dog without a master.

Or I see the twilight, the mornings

over Rome, the Ciociaria, the world,

as the first acts of Posthistory

to which I bear witness, for the privilege

of recording them from the outer edge

of some buried age.

Monstrous is the man

born of a dead woman’s womb.

And I, a foetus now grown, roam about

more modern than any modern man,

in search of brothers no longer alive.
…..


The Lament of the Excavator

I
It is only loving, only knowing that matters,
not  having  loved, not  having  known.
To live for a past love

makes for agony. The soul
doesn't grow any more.
Here, in the enchanted heat of the night

in its depth down here
along the bends of the river with its drowsy
visions of the city strewn with lights

echoing still with a thousand lives,
lacklove, mystery and misery of the senses
make me an enemy of the forms of the world,

which until yesterday were my reason for living.
Bored and weary, I return home,
through dark market places,

sad streets by river docks,
among shacks and warehouses mixed
with the last fields.

There, silence is deadly.
But down along the Viale Marconi,
at Trastevere station, the evening still seems sweet.

To their neighbourhoods, to their suburbs
the young return on light motorbikes --
in overalls and work pants

but spurred on by a festive excitement,
with a friend behind on the saddle,
laughing and dirty. The last customers

stand gossiping loudly
in the night, here and there, at tables
in almost-empty still brightly-lit bars.

Stupendous and miserable city,
you taught me what joyful ferocious men
learn as kids,

the little things in which the greatness
of life is discovered in peace,
how to be tough and ready

in the confusion of the streets,
addressing another man, without trembling,
not ashamed to watch money counted

with lazy fingers by sweaty delivery boys
against facades flashing by
in the eternal color of summer,

to defend myself, to offend,
to have the world before my eyes
and not just in my heart,

to understand that few know the passions
which I've lived through:
they are not brothers to me,

and yet they are true brothers
with passions of men who,
light-hearted, inconscient,

live entire experiences unknown to me.
Stupendous and miserable city,
which made me experience that unknown life

until I discovered what
in each of us
was the world.

A moon dying in the silence that lives on it
pales with a violent glow
which miserably, on the mute earth

with its beautiful boulevards and old lanes,
dazzles them without shedding light,
and a few hot cloud masses

reflect them over the world.
It is the most beautiful summer night.
Trastevere, smelling of straw

from old stables and half-empty wine bars,
isn't asleep yet.
The dark corners and peaceful walls

echo with enchanted noise.
Men and boys returning home
under festoons of lonely lights,

toward their alleys choked with darkness and garbage,
with that soft step
which struck my soul

when I really loved,
when I really longed to understand.
And now as then, they disappear, singing.

Mothers Ballad

I wonder what kind of mothers have you had. 

If they could see you now at work

in a world they don’t know,

taken in an endless circle

of experiences so different from theirs,

what look would they have in their eyes?

If they were there, while you, conformists and baroques,

are writing your article

and you give it to editors who are used

to all kind of compromise, would they recognise you?

Coward mothers, with an ancient fear on their face,

which (the fear) is like a disease

that warps features with paleness,

obfuscates them, distances them from the heart,

and lock them in the old moral rejection.

Coward mothers, poor them, troubled from the idea

that their children will know cowardness

to ask for a work place, to be realistic,

to not offend priviliged souls,

to protect themselves from any pity.

Lousy mothers, who have learnt

with a child-humility

only one bare meaning about us,

with souls in a damned world

wich doesn’t give pain nor joy.

Lousy mothers, who didn’t have

for you a single word of love,

if not a meanly mute, beasty love

and in this love they raised you,

harmless to the real call of your heart.

Servile mothers, used for centuries

to bow their heads without love.

to transmit to their fetus the ancient, shameful secret

of contenting yourselves  with the remains of the feast.

Servile mothers, who taught you

how the servant can be happy

hating who is, like him, in chains,

how he can be content and safe

cheating and doing what he doesn’t say.

Fierce mothers, focused on defending

the little that bourgeoises own,

the normality and the salary,

with the rage of the ones who take their revenge

or the ones who are under an absurd attack.

Fierce mothers who said you:

“Survive! Think about yourself!

Don’t have any pity or respect

for anybody, harbor in your chest

your vulture’s integrity!”

There they are, your coward, lousy, servile,

fierce, poor mothers!

They are not ashamed from the knowledge of you

being arrogant in your hate.

This is just a tears’ valley.

The world is yours in this way:

brothers in the opposite passions,

or opponent homelands,

that refuse being different and (refuse)

to answer to the savage pain of being humans.