About poems

I've always admired Carlo Betocchi's poetry. His personal struggle with faith and loneliness, that marked the last years of his life, talks to all our senses. I always reconcile with calm and simple values of life when I read his works, maybe effect of his universal acclaimed "Franciscan vision of a natural world sleeped in the divine." (credits)

source

I've also always admired the way he was able to express himself away from the civil engineering field that was his daily job. It's so flourishing that, whilst building canals, roads and bridges, he had so much to say in art at the same time.

Please be delighted by his personal mix of realism and visionary power. I translated two of his favorite poems of mine for you to enjoy. You welcome!

To himself

Sleep, what sleep was, returns
to stalk you and denies you the light,
terminates where you are, advances where
you are not, your denial
your presence climb upon
the plant of the existence,
the silence of sleep, that word
word that did not dare to call
and that was lying in you, will lie, will
be your natural essence, life like death,
death like life, embraced to the eternal.

I have no more than the difficulty of a life
that is passing, and that by losing its flower
puts up thorns and not leaves, and barely
breathes. Yet, without bitterness.
There's that love hidden in me,
the more miserably modest,
that hint of earth, which resists,
like in the bare fields: a wealth
created, not mine, unquenchable.
Not even the most cultivated, perhaps, but true
existence; as it seems lost
in the cosmos, with its gravity, its laws,
its dying magnetism, not forgotten
by the Soul, but it is actually numbered.
Do not blame me, I am old,
but in my stony silence listen to
how love trills, how fierce it is.

About loneliness

I do not need anything
but you, loneliness;
high, solemn, immortal,
where nothing is but a dream.

In this desert
I wait for the the relentless
coming of a living water
to certainly make me.
 
If the sun
or the unmoved moon triumph
their lumen flows 
like my heart wishes.
 
And I enjoy the brown
land, and the indestructible
certainty of its stuff
already in the greenhouse of my heart:

and I understand that life
is this, deep
light shining in heaven
full of infinite pity.