Poems from Lalla Romano, Poesie, Einaudi, Torino 2001

Silence
Forgive me if so often to your silence,
I know no reply but my own silence.
I see your sorrow flowing like a sad river,
and I make myself like you, a wordless current,
and I accompany you along your weary,
laborious course.

The Call
Out of my sorrow, is this song now born
that rises in the slumbering afternoon,
more desolate than mourn?
I held my mourning secretly inside,
and it returns, a vaster, slower tide.
Transformed into an open lament now,
the jealous bitterness my weeping held:
and in it, I feel the deep call, and how
it answers in the weeping I withheld.

I Am In You
I am in you
as the beloved scent of skin,
as the eye’s own liquid,
the sweet saliva.
I am inside you
in that mysterious way
life is dissolved in blood
and mingled with the breath.

Severance
Does the flower suffer, wrenched from the cluster?
The severed stems must feel the agony;
it no longer looks up, blissful, to the sun,
its lovely crown now bending wearily.
And that affliction is not unknown to me;
I too know the throbbing in every vein,
since I untwined those trembling wrists of mine
that held your neck embraced, my love, my loss.

Faith
Faith is not knowing
another exists;
it is to live
inside him—
to be the warmth
flooding his veins,
to be the dream
weaving through his thoughts.
To walk in sleep
through his world,
and in him
find waking.