Animosity

Jean Baptiste Anoin, Veduta di Roma con il Colosseo e il Foro romano 1860

 I hear a blazing word
in animosity.
Due to a random birth
amid the Southlands,
its graceful tongue
drawing on the brain
the iron brand of Rome the magnifica.

Due also to my mother and her love
for alien jargon, the stairways of grammar
and sweet-scented sounds
of castles old like stories she read when little
and pictured big as life.

 Generations of creatures
beguiled with firelike words and words for words,
and words in constellations
inspiring tales of lore,
the beginning of times,
rulers triumphant and extinct,
ballads of belligerent heroes
against beasts
and human beasts,
yet never against words,
mightiest of blades.

 A Norman voice sets off for the Isles
in vehemence and steel.
What now matters is meaning
so that, continents after,
some random birth
in the lineage of tricksters
blows its kiss upon my brow:
an enticing word, brimful of soul,
of ancient bravery and Mid-Eastern gales.

Stones past and stones imagined
share the knowledge:
all thoughts make pretty graves.
Everything shall be trodden by myth:
empires ecumenical and disastrous shipwrecks.
Enemies turn to guests,
mistresses beget lords who beget despots.
Even concepts mutate:
out of an exhalation
a spirit is shaped
in boldness, then strife.

Let it make its path across the centuries.
Might the young male in me speak
when I hold animosity
an heirloom.
Into its nestling eyes
I recall Bronze Age winters,
nightfall upon the Anatolian meadows,
the ghost riders of wind.

 Por: Rita Gonzalez Hesaynes