Going through my papers, today I ran into a rusty, stapled trove of old poems that have never been published. It bears the date 1991, so I must have typed them with my old Kaypro, on the continuous ream of paper that you had to detach page by page. Around that time, I was living with housemates whom I loved dearly but unfortunately listened incessantly to NPR, especially the reporting on the Gulf War, and I had developed a strong, class antipathy for that radio station, as can be surmised in this poem. Little did I know that I was to hear many a mellifluous voice engaging in in the act of reading poetry many years later, as standard practice in Italy (though luckily without corporate sponsorship).
Scherzo (ma non troppo)
Don’t let anyone
read this over the air
with a mellifluous voice
and say: “This poem
has been brought to you
by Exxon”,
Don’t let a cultured,
highly sophisticated
madam of by-gone times murmur:
“Scherzo, ma non troppo”.
Let the tone be vitriolic,
virulent, viperine:
Vipera, vipera, vipera
sweet serpent of the ancient mother,
come out of the earth’s warm womb
and bite the foot
that treads heavily
on thy soil, sowing
poverty, pollution and greed.
Let the virulence of your argument
bite its rotten core.
Dispatch your Erinyes
to torment the powerful,
let their voices ring incessantly
in ears deaf to the moans of suffering.
Let your Circe come out
and transform these men
into the pigs they are.
And then, on our brooms
we shall fly
to mend the hole
in the ozone,
and then, on our legs
we shall walk
to open new paths.
Pina Piccolo (1991)