When You Leave, Two Are Leaving
One behaves like foreign media:
Only notices the events’ cracks, not the water drops hollowing the stones,
The ballet school the kids used to go to, its eyes gorged out
The dentist’s chair now in the middle of the street,
The song with plastic nostalgia, now real,
All the words we may use without care, for they no longer matter.
Mother saying she has lived far too long; turtle disagrees – it’s springtime.
Suffering too will get stunned.
The abyss of leaving – both directions – is just the first step,
The rest is trajectory, randomness of snipers, trains, rooms, kind strangers:
The flag on the balcony is a plant of mint,
The rest is perfumed dust – don’t breathe it now. Won’t breathe it again like now.
No one knows know we are all leaving, the sky we are looking at is tarmac grey.
Can’t remember the song; in the shoe-box I am bringing the turtle, chewing on mint leaves.
Massimiliano Nastri is a teaching assistant at Queen’s University, Belfast. He writes: ‘I keep reading the works of Zbigniew Herbert, Brodskij, Akhmatova, Vittorio Sereni; the witness of their resistance survived much worse than translations.’ He swims twice a week.