Attilio Bertolucci

Invoked every sundown, it’s you, painted on clouds rouging our treasured plain and all who walk it, with leaf-fresh kids and women damp from traveling, city-bound, in the radiance of a just-stopped shower; it’s you, mother eternally young, courtesy of death’s plucking hand, rose at the fragrant point of unpetaling, you who are the alpha of every neurosis, every torturing anxiety, and for this I give you gratitude for time past, time present, time future.

This is a year of poppies: our land was brimming with them as May burned into June and I returned— a sweet dark wine that made me drunk. From clouds of mulberry to grains to grasses ripeness was all, in the fitting heat, in the slow drowsiness spreading through the universe of green. My life half over I saw grown sons setting off alone and vanishing from sight beyond the prison the flight of the swallow makes in the spent glow of a stormy evening, but the pain gave way humanely to the light coming on inside the house for another meal in air made cooler by hail letting off steam in the distance.