Rome

I don't remember the way your face looked
when we met
because I've grown old with you.

I don't remember how we conversed
when we met
because you spoke Italian and I spoke English.

I don't remember how we loved each other
when we met
because I love you differently now

after children and fights in the kitchen before dinner
and leaving you and coming back
and loving you all over again.

I don't remember what I did to push you away
and what you did
to push me away.

I remember you walking me home
the night we met
beside the shadow of the Colosseum
and across the Tiber

and I remember azaleas
blooming electric on the Spanish Steps
where we played at love by Bernini's marble boat

and riding free on our Lambretta
through midnights and empty streets
with my arms wrapped tight around your waist

and feeling the heat of your young back
against my heart
because Rome belonged to us

and what I don't remember doesn't matter any more.
You are here sleeping beside me and my arms
are still around you, holding on.


- Nadya Giusi (2004)

Wise Words of a Writer (Robert Ardrey)

We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels.
And the apes were armed killers besides.
And so what shall we wonder at?
Our murders, massacres, missiles or our irreconcilable regiments?
Or our treaties whatever they may be worth.
Our symphonies however seldom they may be played;
our peaceful acres however frequently they may be converted into battlefields;
our dreams however rarely they maybe accomplished.
The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk,
but how magnificently he has risen!
We known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.

- Robert Ardrey (1908-1980)

Mystic

They call all experience of the senses mystic, when the experience
is considered.
So an apple becomes mystic when I taste in it
the summer and the snows, the wild welter of earth
and the insistence of the sun.

All of which things I can surely taste in a good apple.
Though some apples taste preponderantly of water, wet and sour
and some of too much sun, brackish sweet
like lagoon-water, that has been too much sunned.

If I say I taste these things in an apple, I am called mystic, which
means a liar.
The only way to eat an apple is to hog it down like a pig
and taste nothing
that is real.

But if I eat an apple, I like to eat it with all my sense awake.
Hogging it down like a pig I call the feeding of corpses.


D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930)