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

Language and Dialect

Take a people
put it in chains
strip it raw
bung its mouth ─
it’s still free.
Deny it work
a passport
a place to eat
a bed to sleep in ─
it’s still rich.
A people gets
poor and slavish
only if robbed of the tongue
issuing from its source.
It gets poor and slavish
when its words are sterile
and devour each other.
(I realize now, tuning
my dialect lute, that
it loses one string per day
as I patch up
the worm-eaten tapestry