Per mia figlia chi Roma mi mostrò
‘ It’s a strange courage
you give me…’
All space is sacred space and all matter sacred matter
though here in this hard city dirty with the grime of empire
where what triumphs, Io triumphe, and what horrors have not been seen,
space and matter appear more sacred, indeed, eternale.
True it is a modern city dirtier still only smeared now with a different debris:
newspapers and modern amphorae, cigarette butts in cracks of cobblestone,
a soulless, now ego-driven graffiti everywhere on endless walls,
the exhaust of countless macchine and buzzing brutes on motor bikes
who overwhelm the pedites crossing into their zones.
But I read Virgil on the Palatine and jogged in Centro Storico
passed surprise and delight where stones, petra, lapis, saxum soon sasso,
the subtle colors of the earth, from every age find form.
I walked upon the Aventine, once sacred to Diana,
and found sanctuary in Santa Sabina, in the natural light.
I stood by the orange trees of Dominic and looked west across the Tevere
where dome after dome after dome still strive to reach the heavens.
And I saw the greatest art, the Pietà and Moses, and Bernini’s whitest sculptures,
the human form, miraculo, from marble stone being born.
And slowly, by degrees, a deep, deep truth, now millennia-old,
began to fill my heart: in this hard and holy city,
‘ u’ siede il successor del maggiore Piero’,
time most reconciles with time, and the human heart
learns to survive, but more than merely survive, to endure.