For Alberto Burri

 

Live more than you show

in the short sutures of your sacks

in the blacks twisted in a definite horror

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in the great whites split by the heat

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or stop exhausted

                       and not die.

Is this the lesson you teach

dear friend of a dead age

with its banal riddles and self-restraints?

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You tell me with affection - and it's what you practice -

that the age-old wisdom is indifference

for the impending world and its fury.

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I go on hoping it's so, but perhaps I'm wrong,

a sign of the cowardice of existence.

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From Giuseppe Loy, "The verses and the trap",

Ubaldini Editore, 1993.