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.