THE LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA

I am still wondering what the slow-endeavouring patience means

And how, unwillingly, I came to grasp it,

and then dominate it, in all its power,

after having exhausted all the peaceful forms of revolt,

not because I should always have yielded without a word,

or that its fury and fire did not test my heart

that was always giving too many branches in its effort to understand,

but only my reconciled crying succeeds in having roots

into the hell inside my daily life,

into the hell outside me, from everywhere outside me,

it is only I, with my long patience,

involuntarily acquired, by the will of fate,

that fate that put the Library of Alexandria on fire

and made it in such a way that only the statue of Ptolemy II remained,

alone in the infernal traffic of the street,

drowned behind walls that are too high,

with huge letters from all the alphabets of the world.

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Daily

When he gets up in the morning, and with a headache,

he doesn’t delay at all; he rushes, half dressed, to open

the window, to smell the cleaned dust of last night,

the aroma of the rotten grass, the rotten fruit behind

the fence wall. The street is still quiet. The flower sellers

pass with carnations or roses in their baskets. “Fake

convictions” he says, “it doesn’t matter” he adds. And

suddenly, the shadow of the city vanishes behind

the chimneys. All around, in the air, diaphanous, almost

triumphant, the buzz is heard from the keys of the stores,

the nails and hooks of the cheap daily business and

            exchanges.

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