p o e m s

r o s i t a  c o p i o l i 

He was holding her picture in his hand, whispered,
“Though the road is arduous,
I’ll snatch you from that place.”
And her silent lips murmured,
“The invincible night is yours,
wedded to death. Your dreams
decay like flesh.
“ I shall stretch a spell-binding music
when I come to you, the word
that will take you back
to our home.”
But at sunrise she said,
“By now I am where you don’t stare. Besides,
would you come to me with strings and bundles,
wearing your cage?”

previous poem / italian originial 

Note to these translations:

Rosita Copioli is a poet of nature and myth. “Mater Matuta” and “Arch of Janus” are the two opening poems of her collection Furore Delle Rose / Wrath of the Roses. She invokes a female goddess and a male god to resume a thread that comes from her first poetry collection The Blazing Lights of the Sun (Los Angeles, Sun & Moon Press, 1996). From her concern for the vegetable world and the origin of life in The Blazing Ligths of the Sun, Rosita Copioli moves to the origins of civilizations and man’s position in the order of things: from chaos to some form. –R.T.

©Rosita Copioli. Translation ©Renata Treitel
from FURORE DELLE ROSE (Ugo Guanda Editore, 1989), with permission

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