Pier Paolo Pasolini

I
It isn’t May-like, this impure air
which darkens the foreigners’ dark
garden still more, then dazzles it

which blinding sunlight…this foam-
streaked sky above the ochre roof
terraces which in vast semicircles veil

Tiber’s curves and Latium’s cobalt
mountains…Inside the ancient walls
the autumnal May diffuses a deathly

peace, disquieting like our destinies,
and holds the whole world’s dismay,
the finish of the decade that saw
the profound naïve struggle to make
life over collapse in ruins;
silence, humid, fruitless…

Young man, in that May when to err meant
one was still alive, in that Italian May
which at least gave life fire, you

so much less thoughtless and impurely sane
than our fathers—but not father: rather, humble
brother—even then with your thin hand, you

were sketching the ideal that illuminates
(but not for us: you, dead, and we
dead too with you in this humid garden)

this silence. You must know you can’t do
any more than rest, confined even now
in this extraneous earth. Patrician ennui

surrounds you. And the only sound that reaches you
is the faded hammer blow on an anvil
from the workshops of Testaccio, drowsy

in the evening, with its shacks of poverty, its
naked piles of tin cans and scrap iron, where
singing, leering, an apprentice already is

ending his day, while the last raindrops fall.