Letizia Leone

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Three Poems of Rome:

 1 - Colosseum

Throw the dice in this arena
for public use
in the tourist hour.

I 'd like to scratch it with a fingernail
this numismatic profile by collection.

I'd like to scratch it with a fingernail
this theater ampitheater of cracks
aground between nettles and deflated condoms.

The landfill has swallowed the city.

2 - Geometric foundation of the city

780 before Christ:
Lazio was a wide periphery.

Go and pull up lines with the plow
from the ford of the Tiber
a square
and joy is a place:
theater of the lawn.

In the large dawn
the flight of twelve birds greeting
over a Roma without a story

a lot of good land for planting chamomile
and verbena.

And now you dig the grooved walls
the circle, the monuments, the opening
for the ranks
and build the chair of imperial  idleness.

3 - Walk

A street on the edge
crashes between the gallery of the buildings

Tiburtino Quarter,
ordinary knowledge of the building,
incurable air sounds bricks
and it smooths the rocks of cement:

these flower boxes
are war-bunkers in line on the sidewalk:

a triumph of daisies.

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The elementary disgrace

Everything peels
and crumbles into daily crumbs
with rusty nails of the crucifixion

minute-like flakes of pumice
minute dispersed between seed of star

divine cereals.

So you think about the loaves and the fishes
of the Master
multiplied to the mass of the deaf
and the lame

so you want to land that time of miracle
on your plate and mix it
to your meal of black crumbs and plugs.

But your hunger is closed by mountains,
a corkscrew
the bitter taste of beer
a body that no longer knows desire.

Previously published Perrone Editore-Roma (2011)

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