THE LAND WHERE YOU WERE BORN
(from: The Fury of the Roses)
Just imagine if the woods came back.
If the golden Turkey oak wood of Carpegna
were to wind itself back around the conca,
surrounding San Giovanni, climbing over the bone-dry
state roads,
and were to over-turn concrete structures and
supermarket lorries.
With oaks and holm-oaks precipitating down to the
coastal shallowe in wavy low-growing black pine
forests, extending up to the point of Focara, just
like the surviving Mesola wood and the sparse pine
forest of Classe.
A great anger, you heard it.
At the traffic lights, on the prison-like coastline,
the shouting of the sea, the defrauded woods,
the dove, the black bird
waiting to take to the wing, you know how everything,
from the Mesola wood to Focara, is fighting,
you don't know to know long the memory of the spirit
of the woods seeping in us will last.
Yet, you know how to know donw and rebuild.
A land green with bursting buds, a fountain
of
words and wind,
genealogies of woods too old for men
to date,
oh, let them flourish once more!
Remember the land where you were born.
Evoke its descendents,
and start all over again.
Rosita Copioli
(Two opposite woods)
Guanda, Milano 1989