Maria Bochicchio was born on a Tuesday in March 1987, in Italy. Words have fascinated her since childhood, and she has pursued them through both prose and poetry. A graduate in modern literature, she is the author of the novel Cazzamala (2020) and the poetry collection Accùra, complementi d’arredo (2022). Her writing has appeared in anthologies, blogs, and literary magazines — from La Repubblica to Corriere della Sera, alongside Ellin Selae, Poesia del Nostro Tempo, and many other islands of language.
For the past six years, she has made her home in Belgium, where she raises two children, collects notebooks, and dreams of a life devoted to crafting jam from flowers.
Between ash and wildness
the sacred resides –
the wise rind of feeling
without the need for prayers.
At a half-fire, the vegetal being,
ever new, ever renewed,
fragrant with annurca apple
and the tang of fermented grape stems,
in spring transforms
the gardens, the waiting faces.
A vast energy,
belonging to no one, drifts and spreads
over the earth, over the slumbering pollen
that does not recognize us.
Who are you? We ask of you the leaves,
the branch, the fallen threshold
upon the bone of the foot.
We should recall the very beginning:
every ear of grain, every furrow,
every liturgical seed.
We should fill our bellies
with the last bread, become beginning
of this primal beauty,
and return to the sorrow of the fields –
to the viaticum of the graft.
*
When wild burnet crouches
at the heels,
and the green-gray scent of ash
bows to the knees,
the gardens swoon upon the shoulder,
and the weight of every youth
collapses
beneath the branch bent with early figs.
Buds rest like sparrows
at winter’s waning,
truths of fruit without tears.
Hearts in hermitage, parted from the clusters –
and the alders drift past as in a dream
through the vastness
of this shawl of steps, of words
shared around a people’s fire.
Not weary of us is the one who had
only a stone for a seat;
not weary is this wandering humanity
of ancient women and men.
The wild pear tree growing within you
dwells in a watchful goodness
long forgotten.
*
I still hold you, weaving a nest
from pomegranates and the ripe figs
of this old village.
I will be queen, you the king,
gathering like a quiet bee
the golden longing of olive trees.
It is time to arrive,
to sink into a noon of peace.
On the shortest of journeys,
naming things becomes salvation –
for the angel, for the ant
climbing along a fingernail.
Stripped of their pulp,
all things come to us
as gentle training.
To spiral, to fall.
To surrender to the lofty grace of an embrace.
See – I still hold you
in this handful of berries,
in far more wonders than I ever imagined.
Poetry in this post: © Maria Bochicchio
Published with the permission of Maria Bochicchio