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

That Year

For Ferdinando Falco
who shared with me
Who knows that year how many of us there were:
Cazzillo, Ferdinando Malacarne who collects dreams
and razors I too in love
with the Comedy leaping with joy
amid this swarm
that wallows in the mud and wants to mend
the stars with restless hands...
but where was I the year
that the moon’s brightness suddenly died out
and the wind fell at a command?
(it seemed at a command, a band
of pining blackbirds shuddered...
why do we sing...?)

• Cazzì, what do you say,
  is this a fit night for a serenade?


• Not a wisp of wind is blowing,
  the calascione is playing, well come on...
  A musical instrument with three or six strings