Italian Reunion

Remembering, unremembering, re-remembering —

the daily thrum of ancestors under the Italian sun,

to water, to wine; to worship the undefinable divine

in an age of despotism and dirt, miracles and mercy.

We are tourists here on the Tyrrhenian Sea, a bumble

bee’s glance from Vesuvius where the mountain

once roiled and roared, pouring forth a Roman wrath

so complete that an entire civilization went silent in a gasp.

We are strangers to quiet contemplation

amid the rumble of traffic, seabird shriek, the bells

of Sorrento marking out time in precise interval.

Our own march on time is a mirage of city and complicity.

Water, salt, blood, ash, bone and memory — we, too,

are relics, and also forebears of story buried far beneath,

story yet to come, the mystery of sleep, the revival of

waking in radiance, boats coming to harbor, fish in their keep.

We return, together and separate, to our worlds of modernity

with the sea, the sky, love’s sweet tooth biting ever so delicately.


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