Three Poems

 

by Alessandra Bava

 

 

 

 

BECKETTESQUE

 

 

Krapp is not a bad word

amid reels and tapes,

just some Beckett re-

loaded on a blue(s)-

session syndromatic

 

day, chewing syllables

and debris.  Listening

to who I was, without

recognizing who I am.

Does it truly matter if

 

that last tape is the most

recent or the ultimate?

I will resort to tactile

talking and to tightrope

writing at the very end.

 

The fire in me...

…burning to be gone.

 

 

 

 

NORWEGIAN WOOD

 

 

7 pm, the clock tick tocks

 

so slowly as I read Murakami.

I’m caught by a wood of words

sucked into such aborescent

depth.  I float

                                                   Idriftaway—

hoping not to be forgotten,

hoping not to be left behind,

hoping to be able to write still

so as to acknowledge the

                                                darkness

of the net permeating

this Norwegian well of souls

trapped in the most radiant,

adamantine hardness.

 

 

 

 

RODCHENKO IN DADAIST MODE

 

A joyous cry!

 

 

Rebel Rodchenko –

your romantic look  –

your photography

 

of facts

capturing all the

cogs of the machine  –

the reticle of shadows  –

the wrong perspectives

of an oblique world –

the story of a

moment

 

But nothing is

like it seems

 

Even

Mayakovsky

in black

and white

turns into a

metaphor

of life.

 

 

(Portrait of Lily Brik for the poster “KNIGI”, 1924, © Aleksandr Rodchenko)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Alessandra Bava was born in Rome in “the year of the barricades.”  She holds an MA in American Literature and manages her own translation agency.  In 2010 she had a cathartic encounter with a SF poet laureate and is currently writing his biography.  Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in elimae, Poetry Quarterly, Anemone Sidecar and Left Curve.  Her first bilingual poetry chapbook, Guerrilla Blues, was published in 2012.  She is the editor and translator of Rome’s Revolutionary Poets Brigade (Volume 1) Anthology.