POEMS by Ilaria Giovinazzo
I belong to heaven and earth
I belong to heaven and earth
to an equal extent.
I have faith in the purity of saliva
and meat
in the light of cells
in the intensity of the beat.
I contest the weight of the world with butterflies,
while I empty baskets of stones
inherited from my mother
I measure my steps by those of the caterpillar
and the salamander.
I listen silently to the prayers of the cedars
and they crown the moth with roses.
Deities hidden in the rocks
they whisper: everything is immortal.
In the shade of a linden tree
the hope of light resists.
This thin iridescent blade
smiles through the narrow leaves
and stay, in the torrid summer,
fatal. It is she who advances, falls.
EMPTY
Like bamboo cane
blown by the wind.
Quarry.
Like blind orbit
uselessly painted.
Lost.
Like the muezzin's song
from the top of the Tower,
I call myself by my first name
but no one comes.
Silent.
There are moons and prayers
between me and you
there are distances without peace
and infinite moments.
Good night
Good night
They are just fleeting shadows
our steps on this Earth.
move in the jailer's shadow
giving way to the silence of the stems
grafting new shrubs, new words,
cutting off the evil,
death clinging to the side
you hug me, ignoring the end
the slender movement of the bellflower in December
the answer to the virgin question of children
- tell me mom, why do we die?-
They are the illuminations of the wind,
the repeated song of the cuckoo
on the magnolia branch
to give me the consistency of the seed,
the efflorescence of breath,
to tell me: shut up.
The goddess Tara smiles at Chaos
while I pray to the snow-capped peaks
of my personal Himalaya.
She inhales. She exhales.
Everything is there telling me: shut up.
Ilaria Giovinazzo from Rome in 1979. Graduated in Literature, anthropological address with a thesis in History of Religions. Figurative plastic art therapist and teacher of Literature and History of Art in high schools. She has published the following novels "Lost Souls (Effedue, 2001), "I can't let you go away" (Prospettiva, 2005), "Women of destiny" (Besa, 2007) and the poetry collections "Like a lotus flower" (Ensemble, 2020), "The simmetry of the bodies" (Ensemble, 2021), "The religion of beauty" (PeQuod, 2023). In 2022 she also published the illustrated book for children "Life. Ten important things" (Fuorilinea) and in 2023 she edited the plaquette, published by Ensemble, of the event “Poetic symphonies concert for strings and winds” conceived and directed by her. She translated from English the poems of the Kashmiri mystic Lal Ded in the volume “Pura Luce. Canti mistici dello shivaismo kashmiro” (Jouvence 2024). Her poems have been published in anthologies, specialized magazines and literary blogs (De sur a sur, Atelier, Metaphorica, Transiti Poetici, Formafluens, Inverso Giornale di Poesia, La Bottega della Poesia de La Repubblica, Centro Cultural Tina Modotti). She has received awards, mentions and honorable mentions in various competitions, including the Ossi di seppia International Prize for Unpublished Poetry, the L’Arte in versi Prize and the Lorenzo Montano Prize. She has been trnslated into English, Spanish, Arabic and Bengali. She lives and works in the Sabine hills.
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