Words

Pier Paolo

i. Easter Sunday

 

You understood in these eternal moments of life

and of understanding

these banal moments of time and of understanding

the framed close up of a life hard won

a thought hard won

struggled for

in this awkward world

you understood the poetry inherent in the image that is life's own

the thought that rises solemn and laughing towards the creation's sacredness

the sublime moment caught in the mere factuality of things and of people

of that that is

untarnished

beautiful

even in its often all too seeming ugliness

simply, ah, simply! because, 'it', that is, we and the world, exist.

 

Pier Paolo

they left your battered smashed body

a symbol of all that is wrong in the world

their ugliness, the ugliness of power

written there awful un-viewable

your beautiful frame

your beautiful thoughts mind and voice

your visceral beautiful dialectics

crushed smashed to a bloodied pulp of a face

did they turn you into some secular saint

the echo of that dark and bloody faith

with its crucified god and tortured saints

 

in any case

it should never of happened

this political existential assassination

it truly was a sin a profanity

here I speak as you did

with the open schizophrenia of spirituality

within late modernity

god without a god that is our own

what they showed finally in this

was their fear the fear of the ignorant

of the powerful

the fear of truth

the fear of the wide arcing mirror of the world

that you held up like a more earthly sun

 

but let us recall instead the greatness of your vision

the unspoilt vision of, as Celan, would say, one who speaks the shade,

who keeps yes and no unsplit

who speaks the world in its entirety -

a world you really did love regardless

or in spite of or even at times in delight of

its corruption and foulness -

the workers the ordinary people going about their daily business

trying to get by to find a laugh a love a fraction of time

a siesta in the shade of the sun

the sun that litters your works as it litters also the streets of Rome

of Friuli of Italy

'dove e Pasolini?

 I remember calling out mock jokingly a little drunkenly amongst

the ferris wheel spectacle of total tourism in Campo di Fiori

 

ii.

 

what is it we are actually looking for in this flying world?

at the end of the day as at the beginning

the slight tremors of faint terrors that send one

briefly diving back beneath the covers

back into the organic anarchic tentacles of sleep

 

hey, hey there, wait for me, I won't be long

see

the friends stroll along the road of life

they laugh as the wine and the daily festival takes hold

to be intoxicated by the sight of it all

cloud buildings sky

dog trees leaves buildings sky

cars planes people people traffic sounds

constant moving living thinking feeling beings

a huge colossal organic energy sacred and profane simultaneously

beautiful and ugly

hot and cold

what are you looking for in this flying world?

 

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 ©paul sakoilsky 2014