Poem

Venice Stones

In silent moments you hear their presence
around the house, you sense them
being there preparing
clamours coming from afar,
voices that, as a child, you imagined
glimmering from other shores,
with syllables soaked in fists of sunlight.
Now it’s the fog that seems to keep
these grey rectangles most alert,
the leather shoes’ steps most alive
like your wait in the past, staring
outside, through the curtains, with shy eyes
into the swirls of dark stillness
trying to detect mother’s heels ticking.

And later another’s, the hard, bright
stamping of a pair of clogs
from out of pines into the calle,
the May morning bathed in geraniums,
the stones aloud with the undiluted
first warmth of light.
Steps approaching, announcing the clogs’
redness and polka-dot trousers.

Announcing.
And retaining in the heart’s avenues.
Along the lagoon
the banks’ marble running white into the haze.

Davide Trame
Venice, Italy

I am an Italian teacher of English, born and living in Venice, Italy, writing poems exclusively in English since 1993, they have been published in around four hundred literary magazines since 1999, in U.K, U.S. and elsewhere.

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