Realism(s) #15, or: this needle of the world

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A huge thunderstorm

rolled around in coils all afternoon above

the roof-tops before it broke in flashes and sheeted down.

I stared at the lines of cement and glass

that walled up screams and wounds and limbs

including mine, which I have survived. Warily, looking

now up at the roof-tiles doing battle, now at the dry page,

I listened to the word

of a poet perish or change

into another voice we no longer hear. The oppressed

are oppressed and quiet, quietly the oppressors

talk on the phone, hatred is polite, and even I

believe I no longer know who is to blame.

Write, I tell myself, hate

those who sweetly lead into nothingness

the men and women who walk beside you

and believe they do not know. Write your name too

among those of the enemy. The storm

has passed away with all its bluster. Nature

is far too feeble to mimic battles. Poetry

changes nothing. Nothing is certain, but write.

--Franco Fortini, Translating Brecht, written 1957-62. Trans. Paul Lawton.