Antonietta Bocci
When, distressed by the ambushes of those
reluctant to compassion, I return
to your plaque of inert soaked wood, I like
questioning my lost future – If I sailed
tomorrow for an immaculate life
made of brightness and promises, would I
come here again to lay branches in bloom
on this cold, embittered dry land of mine?
Weeding under the crab apple in a
present withered by now, I catch myself
picturing a day that does no longer
expect rituals of calm from my soul –
Will I ever succeed in watering
down, by living, this piercing pain that still
grabs-my-neck breaks-my-breath leaves-me-dying
near your house of tree, my sweet little one?
***
Antonietta Bocci has spent her adult life working as a linguist with Italian, English and Mandarin Chinese, in a diasporic space stretching across Italy, Nigeria, China and the UK. As a new poet, she writes dual-language poems (in Italian and English), in a process whereby the two versions engage in a mutual contamination, rather than one version being the translation of the other. For her, the magic (and the biggest challenge) of poetry is that it exists suspended in the interstices between the tangible and the impalpable, the desired and the real, the remembered and the imagined.