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From: Vol.07 N.01 – Plant Poetics

[Touching each other they think themselves old]

by Julia Anastasia Pelosi-Thorpe

Touching each other they think themselves old.

Fingers on temples, gazes overlapping.

Perhaps it’s what fingers will bear

and tendons will lose to make them exist.

But today they were a space trembling neither with peace nor conflict.

They were the idea of a flower opened-up sterile.

They say we get old so we can know about living

they say we’ll die so we can push an idea of peace or conflict

to pull real flowers from branches to sun.

 

 

Translated from a poem by Maria Borio:

 

 

Si pensano vecchi toccandosi.

Le dita sulle tempie, gli sguardi che coincidono.

Forse è quello che sopporteranno le dita

e che i tendini perderanno a farli esistere.

Ma oggi erano spazio che trema senza pace né lotta.

Erano l‘idea di un fiore aperto e sterile.

Dicono invecchiamo per sapere di vivere

dicono moriremo per spingere un’idea di pace o lotta

a tirare al sole fiori veri dai rami.

Translated from a poem by Maria Borio:

Maria Borio is an Italian poet and poetry editor of the journal Nuovi Argomenti. She has published two prize-winning poetic collections, of which Transparency (Interlinea, 2019) is the most recent, in addition to poems in larger collections and journals, and academic publications on Italian poetry.

Published: March 2020
Julia Anastasia Pelosi-Thorpe

is an Italo-Australian translator completing her MA in Italian Studies, where she is writing on the ventriloquism of voice in seventeenth-century Italian poetry. She translates from Italian and Latin, and can be found at @jpelosithorpe.

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journal of ecopoetry and ecopoetics.

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