Journal of Italian Translation - Brooklyn College - Academic Home ...

1.
Santos/Riccardi
UNIONE
The day, the twenty-third of May
from the swamps of Via Pace
someone says I heard something
a mechanical or natural sound
a mixed groan or thing
something rising from a throat.
2.
Opening night of the hunting season
comes just before the latest transformation
in the lives of the factory men.
The machine, the robot running it
watches every man move plying raw materials
and each and every act is changed
from will to distance.
At night in the glare from the furnace
phosphenes rise in the burnished
planet air
like animal groans.
3.
Time and time again I felt and even
now I feel, if I remember well, the fell of burnished air
in a worldwide abyss
of rust and frightening vapors.
That’s how I thought the light rained down
in the southern hemisphere or lower still
over the Pole’s magnetic zero.
4.
Covered in soot
men and beasts go off to hunt.
They beat on drums of gasoline
every step of the way hammering blows and voices
searching the shore of the swamp
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