MILAN – On July 17, 1909, the poet Alfonso Gatto, the protagonist of Italian hermeticism, was born in Salerno. We remember him through his most loved poems. Dispassionate advice
Don’t listen to the king,
don’t listen to me.
Whoever deceives
you always grows a foot taller,
always puts on a cap,
walks upright
with so many medals on his chest.
Do not listen to the sage
, the village
master, the city master
, whoever tells you he knows.
You are wrong only by yourselves
like horses, like oxen,
like birds, fish, snakes
that have no monuments
and never know history.
Who lives is without glory.To my father
If I came back this evening next to me
along the street where the blue shadow descends
already that it seems spring,
to tell you how dark the world is and how
our dreams, freedom lights up
with hopes of the poor in heaven,
I would find a cry as a child
and his eyes open with a smile, black
as black as the swallows of the sea.
It would be enough if you were alive,
a man alive with your heart and a dream.
Now to the earth there is a shadow the memory
of your voice that said to the children:
How beautiful the night is and how good it is
to love us like this with the air full
to sleep. You saw the world
in the full moon protruding from that sky,
the men walking towards dawn. Christmas at Caffe Florian
The pink fog
and the air of cold
rusted vapors with the
whistle of the boat that disappeared
in the open area of ​​the bells in the evening.
A sad window sill,
Venice that browns the roses
on the grand canal.
The stars have fallen, the roses have fallen
in the wind that brings Christmas. The grass
The grass, the silence, the moving of the shadow
Suns, in your morning cry,
the grass, the silence, the moving of the shadow
and the stalks of the wind. Your relief
is to see you calm while waiting
for me to come from afar, your rest
and the hope of meeting us in the evening
by chance in a winter.
Leaving you to disappear,
to be your heaven where you look
without remorse, to have your regret,
your memory, your empty hands…
Maybe it’s sweeter to cry than to have me. Love of life
I see the great trees of the evening
that raise the skies of the boulevards,
the carriages of Rome that
bring the moon to the tombs of the ancient Appia.
All of us had death for a long time.
Still, the road was long in the evening
of gazes at every house, and beyond the sky
at the lights rising from the bell towers
to the blue names of the signs, the heart
will never respond again
Oh, among the dripping branches of houses and sky
the sky of the boulevards
clear sky of swallows!
O human evening of us gathered
tired men good men,
our sweet talk
in the world without fear.
It will come back,
with a leap the awake heart
will have words It will
call the things, the lights, the living
The dead, the vanquished, those who arouse them
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