To My Father

Where Messina lay violet upon the waters, among the mangled wires and rubble, you walk along the rails and switches in your islanders' cock-of-the-walk beret. For three days now, the earthquake boils, it's hurricane December and a poisoned sea. Our nights fall into the freight cars; we, young livestock, count our dusty dreams with the dead crushed by iron, munching almonds and apples dried in garlands. The science of pain put truth and blades into our games on the lowlands of yellow malaria and tertian fever swollen with mud. Your patience, sand and delicate, robbed us of fear, a lesson of days linked to the death we had betrayed, to the scorn of the thieves seized among the debris, and executed in the dark by the firing squads of the landing parties, a tally of low numbers adding up exact concentric, a scale of future life. Back and forth your sun cap moved in the little space they always left you. For me, too, everything was measured and I have borne your name a little beyond the hatred and the envy. That red on your cap was a mitre; a crown with eagle's wings. and now in the eagle of your ninety years I wanted to speak to you -- your parting signals coloured by the night-time lantern -- to speak to you from this imperfect wheel of a world, within a flood of crowded walls, far from the Arabian jasmine where you are still, to tell you what once I could not -- difficult affinity of thoughts -- to tell you (not only the marshland locust, the mstic tree can hear) as the watchman of the fields tells his master: 'I kiss your hands.' This, nothing else. Life is darkly strong.