Two Poems by Davide Trame

SIMPLY
after Dario Fo narrating Sant’Ambrogio

I don’t want to tell you the end of the parable,
the name of the man whose twang sounded
so clearly distant from yours, so foreign.
Who was sick and hungry crying for help
at your door.
Whose destiny, whose needs didn’t concern you,
your worries being enough for now.
I only want to tell you that we knew it already,
it was so tremendously present around,
so simply obvious
and it brought tears to my eyes.


PRAYING

Storm raging, rain,
a roaring wall enveloping us at home,
your pacing up and down
from kitchen to hall,
on the table the two phones side by side,
the landline and your mobile,
both mute by now.
You gaze at them, at the window, at the thick
curtain of water. Nothing can be done.
Roads and railway flooded, the motorway
a stilled snake of a queue stuck in the mud,
and the rustling of voices in the cars
and silences and stares and lightning,
the sky dark grey-green, the pressing
of the clouds’ swollen, bruised fingers.

You turn the directory pages
while a lightning-bolt booms and rattles the windows,
maybe, you say, they will answer at this other number,
you deal –another recorded voice- try later, it says,
same message as before, as ever,
the recorded words hanging in the air
more silent than silence.

You don’t sit down, hooked to the two phones
as your last assets, you take one in your hand,
put it down, then the other.
In their silence, in the silence of the house
and the crashing, the swarming outside
I sense we
are now praying, with no words,
with effortlessly suspended breaths,
questions and hopes sieved
through the rain’s roar,
in the wait that blurs frames.


Davide Trame is an Italian teacher of English. His poetry collection “Re-emerging” is published as an email book by www.gattopublishing.com. He has been writing exclusively in English since 1993.