Poems by Salvatore Quasimodo

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More day s' dispersed away
and return in the hearts of poets.
Across the fields of Poland, the flat of Kutno
with the hills of corpses burning
in clouds of steam, there are the cross
for quarantine of Israel,
the blood of waste, the torrid exanthema,
chains already dead poor has long
fulminates and were open on their hands,
Buchenwald there, the gentle forest of beech,
its furnaces cursed; Stalingrado there,
Minsk and the marshes and snow putrefactive.
Poets do not forget. Oh, the crowd of cowards,
the losers, of the mercy by forgiveness.

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You are still the one with the stone and the sling,
Man of my time. You were in the cockpit,
With the malevolent wings, the meridians of death,
-I have seen you - in the chariot of fire, at the gallows,
At the wheels of torture. I have seen you: it was you,
With your exact science set on extermination,
Without love, without Christ. You have killed again,
As always, as your fathers killed,
as the animals killed that saw you for the first time.
And this blood smells as on the day
When one brother told the other brother:
"Let us go into the fields." And that echo, chill, tenacious,
Has reached down to you, within your day.
Forgot, O sons, the clouds of blood
Risen from the earth, forget your fathers:
Their tombs sink down in ashes,
Black birds, the wind, cover their heart.