From objects of narrative
Fractured into fragments of non-existence
Transmits distant sounds
Of resistance.
Ivan Pozzoni, a renowned poet from Italy, shares his poetry
Ivan Pozzoni, born in Monza, Italy, in 1976, authored essays on Italian philosophers and the ethics and juridical theory of the ancient world. He collaborated with several Italian and international magazines. Between 2007 and 2018, different versions of the books were published. He was the founder and director of some literary magazines. He is included in the Atlas of contemporary Italian poets of the University of Bologne and figures à plusieurs reprized in the great international literature review of Gradiva. His verses are translated into French, English and Spanish. In 2024, after six years of academic studies, he returned to the Italian artistic world.
BALLAD OF THE NON-EXISTENT
I could try to tell you
With the sound of my keyboard
How Baasima died of leprosy
Without ever reaching the border,
Or how the Armenian Meroujan
Under a flutter of half-moons
Felt the air in his eyes vanish
Thrown into a mass grave;
Charlee, who moved to Brisbane
In search of a better world,
Ends the journey
In the mouth of an alligator,
Or Aurelio, named Bruna
Who, after eight months in hospital
Died of AIDS contracted
To hit a ring road.
Nobody will remember Yehoudith,
Her lips carmine red,
Erased by drinking toxic poisons
In an extermination camp,
Or Eerikki, with his red beard,
Defeated by the turbulence of the waves,
Who sleeps, scoured by orcas,
On the bottom of some sea;
The head of Sandrine, Duchess
Of Burgundy heard the rumour of the feast
As it fell from the blade of a guillotine
Into a basket
And Daisuke, modern samurai,
Counted the revolutions of a plane’s engine
Trans-humanizing a kamikaze gesture into harakiri.
I could go on and on
In the stifling heat of a summer night
How Iris and Anthia, deformed Spartan children
Were abandoned,
Or how Deendayal died of deprivation
Attributable to the single crime
Of living the life of an outcast
Without ever having rebelled;
Ituha, an Indian girl,
Threatened with a knife,
Who ends up dancing with Manitou
In the anteroom of a brothel
And Luther, born in Lancashire
Freed from the profession of beggar
And forced to die by His Britannic Majesty
In the coal mines.
Who will remember Itzayana
And her family massacred
In a village on the outskirts of Mexico
By Carranza’s retreating army,
And what of Idris, the African rebel,
Stunned by shocks and burns
While untamed by colonial domination,
He tried to steal an ammunition truck;
Shahdi flew high into the sky
Above the flagpoles of the Green Revolution,
Landing in Tehran with his wings torn apart
By a cannon shot,
And Tikhomir, a Chechen bricklayer,
That fell among the indifferent faces
To the ground from the roof of Lenin’s Mausoleum,
Without comment.
From objects of narrative
Fractured into fragments of non-existence
Transmits distant sounds
Of resistance.
***
THE ANTI-PROMISE TO LOVE
Anti-poet, victim of my anti-poetry,
All I could do is dedicate to you an anti-promise of love,
My anti-promise of love would have the features of a synesthesia,
The Stalinist hardness of steel and the softness of color,
The finesse of friendship and the consistency of love,
Your white eyes turn me into a hydrophobic cynic,
And there’s no doctor for rage, my love.
An anti-promise of love to be read before a registrar,
As to convince a techno-trivial world,
I’ve loved you since June 1976, perhaps, in truth, since April,
I was an embryo and you were still immersed in the aurora borealis,
For six years you would have been an angel, a ghost, the inessential of a fractal,
Without batting an eyelid waiting for you, six years, thirty-six years, with nothing to say,
The sheep of Panurge’s contemporaries would condemn me to total silence.
You are my anti-promise of love, and the idea may seem imperceptible to you,
I observe you sleeping, serene, like a crumb abandoned in a toaster,
My love I am stripped of the role of ‘sapper’ – it is abyssal like a submarine,
Condemned to scatter torpedoes under the (false) guise of a dogfish.
***
HOTEL ACAPULCO
My emaciated hands continued to write,
Turning each voice of death into paper,
That he lefts no will,
Forgetting to look after
What everyone defines as the normal business
Of every human being: office, home, family,
The ideal, at last, of a regular life.
Abandoned, back in 2026, any defense
Of a permanent contract,
Labelled as unbalanced,
I’m locked up in the center of Milan,
Hotel Acapulco, a decrepit hotel,
Calling upon the dreams of the marginalized,
Exhausting a lifetime’s savings
In magazines and meagre meals.
When the Carabinieri burst
Into the decrepit room of the Hotel Acapulco
And find yet another dead man without a will,
Who will tell the ordinary story
Of an old man who lived windbreak?
__________________
Received from Angela Kosta Executive Director of MIRIADE Magazine, Academic, journalist, writer, poet, essayist, literary critic, editor, translator, promoter
