David Howard (Nueva Zelanda) para Isabella Panfido (Italia)

David Howard (Nueva Zelanda) nos manda un poema desde dedicado a Isabella Panfido (Italia)

Red and black
for Isabella Panfido

1

An Italian reads a poem about marriage.

The teenage mother, held back at school,

twists the string of a folder around her finger.

Once she twirled suitors

as if they were earrings – and left them

hanging. Grandma, a child each side, diagonally

crosses the intersection, labouring

under the weight of a plastic basket…

One detail after another, an ocean that won’t stay

between the flags. Even the surfers

who used to finger her blue bikini

wait for another wave. The golden sand

goes to the factory that makes ballerinas

and hour-glasses.

2

She used to live in a hammock

and rain rinsed her grin

away. More languid than Sunday, she

twisted under the blue tunic.

He could see her panties

and began to hope for a four-leaf clover

among the rotting apples,

the fermenting silence.

She collects the eyes of boys

in a flax kete

sent by an anonymous admirer.

The pollen on her cosmetic mirror

remembers the bee

in the next field, then the next.

3

Through the silt of his misgiving

the boy runs, a minor

figure in her dream of the volcanic

eruption. Cliché rather than prophecy –

that was the disappointment he brought her

on an aluminium platter, losing his head

to the fantasy of an adolescent

examining her sex.

Monotonous as a pop song

the promise of youth, whose proteins spill over

the days of the week, whose blood

leaks from a blue tunic and dyes the hammock

hanging between dawn and dusk

red and black.

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