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

Hailstorm

After the swelter, the pelting:
low skies broke out in laughter,
rattling shingles and rooftops.
Languid wheatstalks,
like far off yellow lanterns,
won’t cover the plain with bales of hay,
not this year, nor, perhaps, again. Dead,
they will rust under a blazing sun
and snap, the toll of bent
and broken souls.
Of untilled fields nothing remains
except for brushwood, weeds,
quack grass. Goodbye,
heart of my failing heart, goodbye:
the threshing floor is bare.
(Translated by Anthony Molino)