Fortuna Della Porta

Fortuna Della Porta

FORTUNA DELLA PORTA (Roma, Italy) is a member of P.E.N., Italy.

Please visit her at: www.fortunadellaporta.it
 
 
 
Publications:

  • Rosso di Sera, Il Calamaio, 2003
  • Diario di minima quiete, Lieto Colle, 2005
  • Io confesso, Lepisma, 2006
  • Mulinare di mare e di muri, Lieto Colle, 2008
  • La sonnolenza delle cose, Lieto Colle, 2010
  • Canto Primo (a 1000 lines poem), ‘Poiesis’magazine, 2000
  • Poems, and translations into an Italian dialect: published in anthologies

Theatre:

  • Scacco al re, Carta e Penna, 2006

Fiction:

  • Ritratti, Oedipus, 2007

e-book:

  • Labirinti, kultvirtualpress, 2007

Articles and essays:

  • In magazines and on-line

 
POEMS

As long as you can go, traveller of the seven moons,
The seven tunics, the seven tears’ flasks,
Even if your life’s course is smoothly flowing,
As flat as an arrow on its bow,
Not even then, in your hoary foot heavy with years,
Tamely covering the whole distance, lamb-like
Over the vehement grandeur of the sea,
Not even then you’ll reach the earth’s border.
In that very spot even a stone will tell you that everything comes from nothing,
Heading for the unreal.

 
Long shadowed sea
I’m hurrying.
I loose feet and tide
I appease my breath.
Turning down
Through a life’s curl
In leaving I welcome
Remembrances and lilies
Burning along Winter.
Here on my breast I embrace others’ breaths,
Animals, constellations,
And the stones that were used
To pave for a step, the last one at once.

 
Time’s ashes,
Nothing of me is to be saved,
Not a hand, not a single one of my hair.
Oh, small saliva pearls among teeth,
Where I put the word ‘love’ and the first kiss,
Please tell the world that I still have tender lips
And a roaring heart …

 
From the sun’s flag
To my soul’s fire
Nothing’s hazier than the swallows’ flight
Nothing heavier than my blood.
I’m going on living, in spite of
Feeling that I am quietly a meteor
Quietly a stranger.

 
The vintage gives off on pears and walnuts
The song of a woman whose Autumn bite
Makes no equation equal to each other.
As long as my breast opens to air,
Before any trace disappears
Of my heroic prints,
I’ll maintain my tuned pace.
On the meridian sparks
I’ll throw the red oranges of my tenacity.
Fisherman-like I’ll fight my battles
And hit the sky’s vault
Till I write : here I have been. I’ve been breathing.

 
I won the seas throughout to arrive
At this twilight of distance.
In the nothingness of days – months and years
Hurling forwards –
I can think that only death
Keeps in step from the beginning to the end.
I do not move. I touch nothing.
Not even your hand.
To me it’s enough to look at the root of your wrist
To touch its pulsing and rattling.
The gloomy life doesn’t need words.
Without words, lines and fears grow
Through my lips, the same which are
Trembling on your rough pose.
I see vowels springing from the secret
Of your dark place, howling like me
And bleeding to the parting time.

 
This have I learned from silence :
Solitude is as motionless as marble.
I cannot find a paragraph to describe the inexpressible.
Syllables are of no use, a heart’s embolus is enough
In my evening and in yours
It throws a fisherman’s web
since we are as silent as fish.

 
Fortuna Della Porta
© Translated into English by Giuliana Lucchini

 
Published with the permission of Fortuna Della Porta