Dialect Poetry of Southern Italy (Italian Poetry in Translation Book 2)

Would that My Song Could Find Her

No longer do we sing or dare to fly,
oh, last of the April swallows.
Caught in these drapes
of fog, a cuckoo alone prays, prays
for this language
on the wane, dragging toward its death...
Pray for her, gold feathered cuckoo:
carry this song, the notes of this reed,
to the far edge of the woods,
where furrows no longer mark the land
and no trace of this people remains,
but for seeds no forbear would recognize,
pits scattered and lost
spelt mixed with dregs and chaff...
the canary is mute
the greenfinch, weary
of trying to untangle the tongues
that stretch across the countryside
like endless spools of thread.
Pray for her, for this language,
for these barren, sickly fields:
mountain veins once gushing with water