Live Encounters Poetry & Writing September 2024
Conversations with my grandmother,
La Villetta Cemetery, Parma, and beyond
poem by Edward Caruso.
Conversations with my grandmother,
La Villetta Cemetery, Parma, and beyond
1
From quadrangle to quadrangle,
to walk these corridors,
not only for great uncles and aunts,
great grandfathers and grandmothers,
but those others who’ve passed through.
Your picture, my need to reminisce:
Parma with its soft colours, veiled skies,
riverbeds lined by oaks and elms;
Bologna on my return,
hidden canals and streets,
graffiti-covered pillars aglow
as my night bus rumbles
across uneven street paving.
2
On some nights I dream of ropes
dangling from skies,
just out of reach.
I try to fix them down.
3
In your town, landscapes
that could pass for paintings,
hazy skies.
Allegations of gypsies who presumably filch
fifth-storey apartments, who climb towards
windows barely open.
Here in Bologna,
close to where Biagi was gunned down,
an addict shoots up behind a parked car.
A graffito on via Pratello:
‘Chi ha qualcosa da dire si mette avanti e taccia’. [1]
There’s a parallel in this directive
among crimes against the State and others
in the frailties of our being.
Let me search for you here.
4
You once spoke of keys and the doors
they’d open, an omen of the love in store,
but the only chances are those that come once
and suddenly vanish.
5
Each time I leave Bologna to visit you:
the weather that accompanies departure;
those left behind, their farewells;
the elderly man with ragged hair floating
in the rain while his grandson holds
a black umbrella, at waist height;
rains that fall in mid-Summer;
the beauty of photographing wet streets
that reflect a church entrance before a liturgy.
Add the renaissance windows with their white pillars
and faded red curtains;
divining rods used in search of Felsina’s ores;
the climb to San Luca
and folly of snows reported over Milan;
poppies sprouting between cracks
of cobbled stone and concrete;
mosquitoes hitting the parks in the dreaming of the day
where lovers treat wooden benches
as matrimonial tables laden with presents,
our hillsides hidden from the Montagnola Gardens.
6
The history lesson of the ex-partisan
I met in piazza San Martino, Bologna,
extolling freedom, but reflecting
that our understanding of it has been shaped
within, rather than outside, liberty.
Someone of your day who’d slept in hiding
without knowing if he’d be apprehended
by fascists and executed.
Think of this city, of the Reformation
that took seed beyond these borders.
Think of the civic responsibility that begins
with the self, id and ego,
with the almost sixty years that have elapsed
since the war-time Resistance,
the psyche now one’s property
rather than the confessional’s,
a secular public’s ethics subverted by free markets.
The day I was told all this the skies were a deep blue,
dearer than ever because such days
lie beyond the observations of a war survivor
who brought the above views to me,
observations I have to share with you
because for too long we’ve had no dialogue.
7
The heat of day, ghost-town figures
and shadows creeping across streets.
Piazza Maggiore, preparations for August fifteen,
acrobats counter-balancing on a wire
by a ship with white sails
and actors in see-through cotton dresses
balancing on metal props with wheels.
I search lines from Attilio Bertolucci’s ‘Parma’,
his longing to rebuild the war-ravaged city.
There are intimations of a voice calling out,
a need for your presence,
beyond the quadrangle where this piece began;
beyond the cathedral next to me,
drizzle outside a bookshop I enter for a line or two
of Vita Nuova as a backdrop to the pealing bells.
8
Light fading across balconies and rooftops,
this place engages,
with its windows and towers,
porticos and student quarters,
wooden beams and pillars.
Through it all the graffito:
‘La libertà ha i nostri occhi’. [2]
9
It’s inevitable – we’re distant but close.
There’s a need to complete this inscription,
and it’ll never be exact.
There’ll never be the same view of the one building,
whether it’s a window covered in vines that will flower,
or a ledge seen for the first time for its floral patterns.
Our innocence is a well of tears and rainwater
that purifies everything we tell each other.
It’s in that view along via Farini
as it curves away from via Santo Stefano.
That sight is my voice and it’s my well.
Follow it, like the paths of your ducal park
or the shadows of your borghi, and you’ll catch me.
Life goes on unimpeded,
and when I return it’s like seeing
everything for the first time.
That picture is my Felsina.
Note:
[1] ‘Whoever has something to say step forward and shut your mouth.’
[2] ‘Liberty has our eyes.’
© Edward Caruso
Edward Caruso has been published by A Voz Limpia, Australian Multilingual Writing Project, ‘La Bottega della Poesia’ (La Repubblica, Italy), Burrow, Communion, Kalliope X, Mediterranean Poetry, Meniscus, Melbourne Poets Union, n-Scribe, Right Now, StylusLit, TEXT, Unusual Work and Well-Known Corners: Poetry on the Move. His second collection of poems, Blue Milonga was published by Hybrid Publishers in 2019. In August of that year, he featured on 3CR’s Spoken Word program. In 2024 he co-judged the Ada Cambridge Poetry Prize.