Thursday, January 12, 2023: Davide Trame's "The Layers", and "The Ballad of the End"

 

© 2023 marie c lecrivain

Davide Trame is an Italian teacher of English, who has been writing poems exclusively in English since 1993. His work has been published in over one hundred literary magazines since 1999, in the U.K, U.S. and elsewhere, most recently in Poetry New Zealand and New Contrast (South Africa). He lives in Venice, Italy.

The Layers

 

Riding down the road, in the wind

which brings and scatters things,

I was passing by the car park

which was once a courtyard,

my mother told me, where

her grandmother’s mare was buried.

She always brought grandma home 

trotting on her own

and dragging the cart late in the day

on which grandma, so tired now,

loosening the reins, had fallen asleep.

My mother is buried not much

farther off, on the cemetery

where her grandma is buried too, 

somewhere.

Well, we often forget place and time

about the vast space all down here.

Roots, mulch, dust, the extended

remnants of anything where 

we are going.

Maybe under the mare’s there are

much older bones and maybe

“...the gear of foreign dead men”.

Well, we know how much

after being on the surface,

with our hubbub of sighs and cries,

we sink and subside.

 

Some of us prefer to burn

and be scattered on the river or the sea,

an aerial going down, gentler maybe.

 

© 2023 Davide Trame

 

 

THE BALLAD OF THE END

(after finishing Great Circle)

 

I’ve been lingering longer lately

on the last pages of great stories

as if they were the final steps

of a long journey, of a life really, 

wishing to postpone their conclusions 

as if staying as much as I can

on the last fringes of a coast,

too much I’ve been loving 

the blessed margins of the land,

their best crowds of strings of weeds

threaded over like creeds.

Arched and thatched 

to all this I have been attached:

Yes, I want them never to be over, 

skirting along the beach like a plover,

fiddling with the fiddle of the shoreline,

stuck on its sinuous shine..

but time comes, you know, 

when you have to leave the show,

when you can only give up

and accept the big nap.

So I’ve been lingering longer lately

on these last pages, to better gaze out

from this rim, at the horizon of the sea, 

and better wait for the rhyme

between nothing and me.

 

© 2023 Davide Trame