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Chris Saitta Jun 2019
That night, one of the old guard died,
And the rain said nothing,
And the thunder said nothing,
And the clock with its bell chimes
Struck nothing.
For F.H.
Chris Saitta Jun 2019
Sicily is the golden caesura of history,
Where the human poem is paused to hear
The exalted precipice of its own sigh.
Chris Saitta Jun 2019
I make my grave in her dark treason of hair,
Fragrant master of soldiers and memories,
Bei capelli, conspiracy of internecine curls.
Her upbraidings strangle all my sweet nothings
To breathless wish of the emperor-purple of lips.

Flow then like black gloss of birds
And the brood hatchlings of shadow, exiled eastward,
Fled like a premonition of warmth somewhere far off,
While the wine-colored blood spills his heart into a throng of mouths.

Love, you are the hardest grave,
Were you ever just a kiss
Or always from daggers made?
Porcia or Portia was second wife to Marcus Junius Brutus.  She has been speculated to be one of the few who knew of the plot against Caesar.
"Bei capelli" is translated as "beautiful hair."
Chris Saitta Jun 2019
You too will die,
Bird with the little eye
That sits outside in the green holly;
We say our goodbyes,
You with your nodding head
And me with my sighs.
For J.F.
Chris Saitta Jun 2019
Fall is an empty street in Rome,
Of byways of dry-leaf stone and moth-haunted hours,
Of market stalls with their over-haggled and fingered rinds,
And melons moiled over and palmed and bruised.
The light blows like once-told ripeness from the basket of fruit.
Chris Saitta Jun 2019
Greece burned its sins in the days of Rome,
City of wrinkled roads like the crushed pillow
From a sleeping lover who left long ago.  
The sea tends to its wool-gathering of sands.
Chris Saitta May 2019
Love is a Phoenician breeze,  
Purest abjad of Tyrian purple and royal blue,
Pillow bearer of golden consonance between kings.

Love is a Phoenician trader over deepest-sounded seas,
Far-blown nomad that still wants for the thunder of golden drums
And the rain that comes in rounded vowels of water.

Because love has no tribe but is the purest nomad.
Note: “abjad” refers to the Phoenician alphabet that had only consonants and no vowels.  It is considered a pure abjad and was one of the first alphabets spread through the Mediterranean.
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