Born in Taranto in 1978, Biagio Lieti lives between Rome and the Apulian village of Carosino. His first collection of poems is Le Battaglie e I Robusti No (Poiesis Editrice, 2008), and his poetry has appeared in several anthologies, among them Poeti Circus, i nuovi poeti italiani intorno ai trent’anni (Poiesis Editrice, 2005).
In 2008, Lieti was selected to participate as an author in the XXIII Biennale of Young Artists in Europe and the Mediterranean. From 2007 to 2009, he took part in the Seminari di Marzo organised by Laboratorio Progetto Poiesis, under the direction of the poet Giuseppe Goffredo.
Lieti works for Graphuglia – Editoria e Comunicazione, directing a laboratory of book writing and creation with an aim to bring poetry closer to children, in collaboration with Lab – Libri, a small publishing house dedicated to the publication of ‘poet children’.
The battles, the vigorous nots
(Poiesis Editrice, Bari 2008)
My green should have revived authentic
out of the cold debris of ancestors;
but badly were they mixed,
and I now am the smothered grass
of he who could not transplant me
Fragments of an azure palace
My green
Clemente Di Leo
It kindles time when you spend it slow
an equilibrist on tiptoe
wandering about still for when you thought you’d pass close by
as if adjusting the arch to a blade of grass
chance, the opportunity of a forgetful wind
starting from a name a novelty brief and cheap,
direction to where it goes to end up to.
And I ascribe to azure threads cast bright
which does break me in halves
the game that I follow quick here and there
though here and there I can comfortably sit,
sipping bitterly from pine trees:
that’s when I take to distracting myself to where you can
[imagine and not.
Wait. Even for a little more,
this mumbling isn’t the last thing I can do
and even the boldness I display now
does the trick you’d expect
repeated as best as you can
from what you were yesterday
before you remained silent.
Biagio Lieti
© Translated from Italian by Danilo Caputo
I
Up they are brought, at the extreme.
sickened. An early bird.
Limping, vague.
Neither the strength to wonder
sky blue holes
to gurgle in the most secret skins
the last patron airs;
writing useful for living.
From chaos shines
the mark which shows the sacks
to listen to.
And now to me it seems to have said
by rubbish worse pronounced;
unreachable floras,
or hardly possessed. Too bad.
Nor are they able
half surprises
to shine a light
to bring order
among the chaotic clouds.
The tides make good
in their own way
for fogs arisen in a sheltered place
and how many winds were missing
from memory’s vaults
at every whip of the Ionian Sea.
How obscene this desire
that grows under skin
and swells.
What slavery
having to find the worse words
though not for landscapes
that costs bring up again.
You do not know about all that disgracing.
Neither do I, I look, glimpse,
extol.
Nor he who blushes overthere
in those furious insides
that so need be upset,
and boiled.
It isn’t quite convenient
to seize the price
of all that ends,
and hidden properly
there is an evil that heats,
and heats
for every more piece of flight
that breaks up and solves
mother roots
hides unrepeatable each time
mild fresh touch of breeze
so that nothing remains but
to be able to pluck
with naked hands
of veiled polish
which flee the sunlight
carried by the whole
of the shortest gusts.
Neither can you scream the void
in front of the unrecognizable
overflow of light,
nor can you restart flights in breast
in a game where everything returns
from the pristine lands.
Biagio Lieti
© Translated from Italian by Danilo Caputo
II
The livid havoc
upon,
pantocreator.
That.
To pass
through unrepeatable
unsolved tides,
fires of heavy shadows
without day nor night,
discordant wheeze beside
the melancholic sound of fields.
The price
for what remains
it was heaven I saw disappear.
And the silent crowds gorge
so that tempts me heavily
every hour more
though I notice nothing.
Biagio Lieti
© Translated from Italian by Danilo Caputo
III
In this continuous chattering
in the lengthened presence
of dark whispering,
but there is a right time
not to look around,
impossible,
though capable of feigning its presence,
eternal.
Countryside
is an unpleasant refuge for healing.
The eternal stink that overcomes
inflicted overwhelms
but cannot escape.
Why then go crazy
about how everything should have gone right.
And why then die
for this uncertain void.
Country monks
do not ride Mercedes,
by definition.
But they quickly preferred,
not ready not reborn yet,
the invisible shadows,
the new stars,
the lunar sickening dewlaps
to blush faster their foreheads
with handfuls of powder coming down infected
and a plague to understand us fragile
they burst open in succession, there since then,
together,
each name shouted out,
before they were almost about to say;
before: there was life.
And the Cheradi Islands seen from Roccaforzata
have common fogs
roofs that you cannot notice yet,
photographic filters of careful fates.
Biagio Lieti
© Translated from Italian by Danilo Caputo
I
I set your close gates properly
you who still have forges and muscles to unroll iron,
to gather steps for my margins, upon my knees.
You make desert of my offered faces
make desert and ruin of my slender smashed naked impulse
make desert of the gusts which I breath around you, of those loves.
It’s the freezing of this light,
that secretes clarities between my nipples,
on these confident iron wire hairs,
swaggering against storm slaps.
It’s this absolute fear,
these are smashes,
it’s this eternal unbearable caress,
it’s these plantations,
it’s this cattle.
I dream to clarify the rash beat
I dream to tell you velvet truths, through other truths,
I dream of inventions, infinite flights, precise shadows on bread loafs left to
[the wind.
Biagio Lieti
© Translated from Italian by Danilo Caputo
II
It’s this extending,
of this tiring grazing of compound dance,
it’s this epic sucking,
it’s your eyes not empty yet,
it’s the generous poses which I build charming under your loggia.
I dream of resurrection
through firstling sparks
dubious sunrises
speaking of light
advancing glory,
I dream of vague places
where finding minutes in vane
for these unbearable goodbyes.
Don’t ask everything and nothing else,
the shops that could listen to me perhaps do not say the whole
perhaps not all happens if I use the wrong words.
Biagio Lieti
© Translated from Italian by Danilo Caputo
III
This place that gave me birth seeks from me answers
where I bear in my throat an unsustainable use of words and cadmium
and where I still have enough ravines
that I do not find the strength to stop searching.
And creators are these rocks
they are enough for answers,
for screaming the parent explosion.
Tomorrow is too early to commemorate all killed minutes, the never
[spoken ones.
This sky which crushes me forces me in vain,
My plantations try the colour rise.
Don’t say more.
What sense can I find on the table where things manage well.
If roller shutters, amplified by the leather of penalty kicks
now break echoes, and memories, laddered,
drown stories.
In this place that gave me birth I do not seek men again,
I hope of a precise horizon:
how many new dresses are needed to make daylight.
Biagio Lieti
© Translated from Italian by Danilo Caputo
IV
The moment of light
that gathers
on the armrest which I discipline
establishes silences.
Who knows if the pain that I feel now,
behind this glass,
while I look at the moving
legs of this country,
is an evil
that you too know perfectly.
Rain repeats
the unfailing rhythm
of each voice, of each thing,
shoots at you stink of nothing,
of a job not arriving.
People that come home
embellishes with dazzling edge,
with glows that I also have to invent just to speak.
Biagio Lieti
© Translated from Italian by Danilo Caputo
V
I bear the weight of words, that sprouts, chases, stains,
climbs unannounced while I tuck in for rest.
Tomorrow morning I will have wet flowers on my forehead
and the essential peace to understand the unexpressed sleep
so that I will find myself grazing
where I leafed hardly through one night travels.
Mistakes, faults, evils, hide if I point them.
Do not tell your children where they were born,
carry them on bicycles through road edges
where Aaron’s rod breaks the brand new asphalt with its head
and shakes, breaks its neck to the wind through billions of yesis.
I can be colour even here,
among these clothes hung in the sun that try to embrace but can only touch me
[lightly.
Perhaps I can still be colour in front of the doors of your embrace,
I know carefulness of this solar ball like you, and I can try in much more
[warmth.
Biagio Lieti
© Translated from Italian by Danilo Caputo
VI
And the desert that through outburst of rumbling cavalry
the sirocco assaulted
from the professorial gulf blowgun through which it burst,
today more or less tells of sunken silences,
of indigestible swallowed
that wind etymons and stormy tricks desert
air,
exhumeempty, empty spaces.
Contraptions smiles posts vibrating.
Only anxiety brings you further,
in winter through these cheerful planes
that this morning ascertains torpors
and hands which do not need to hold you.
I bear the all incredible stomach of knick-knacks
and the presaging rubbish upon closed piles.
So that I can consume myself while listening to you.
Look around. I can consume myself while finding colours
testing which pencils to use.
Biagio Lieti
© Translated from Italian by Danilo Caputo
VII
We were sea folks, you and I, some point we should have taken off together
you were urinating, would have been the same a couple of feet further,
I was trying to make a cliff of my forehead, thinking how many strokes would
[needed
to swim my way to the Valona port in one night;
you were cleaning, pulling up your tight jeans, pocketing matryoshkas of
[paper tissues.
I left, to make you beautiful, to have something to do still, perhaps.
Even so I still need to do you, to gather the things which you forget.
If I can, I still need to do you, to thwart you.
But I must mind what I miss,
these years are epochs of exile dances,
all that could bring me delight is now unreal, unknown,
only on these pages which still have white to unroll over of my feet
can be said what’s missing.
Biagio Lieti
© Translated from Italian by Danilo Caputo
VIII
We had to believe the addition there, that fertile dawn,
we had to believe it there, so that when we plundered on medlar tree
we could better share the words to say, breed ignorant crimsons.
We could believe them there, listening to the whole explosion of that corn poppy
[lake, one by one.
I can draw your profile fresh gust, and I discover you, I meet you, I give
[you the most useful jewels;
I want to run towards you only, and regain you that my forehead may blush.
I can smash running and rambling: I must see you drawing down on your
[shoulder the metallurgical evening.
Biagio Lieti
© Translated from Italian by Danilo Caputo
Published with the permission of Biagio Lieti