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 POESIE  TRADOTTE

IN INGLESE

QUEEN BE

The young queen on her first and usually last flight couples with the 

first drone to reach her. The nuptial flight is broken tragically by the 

downward plunge of the mutilated male, almost eviscerated: the queen

 carries, fixed in her body, his genital organs, of which the waiting 

worker-bees will help her to rid herself. But she retains inside, in the 

sperm-case, his seminal fluid which will suffice to fertilize her periodically 

and copiously almost up to her death. All the other maies, now superfluous

 for procreative ends, voracious idlers will be massacred by the female 

workers destined to perpetual virginity.

Queen bee, Love:            a gold fleck in high blue, an illusion pursued by a carefree horde of the death-bound... and one one has reached the fugitive queen in heat. A leap             dance laugh            sob, the sky bed, the whole of nuptial life in one flight,                                          mad flight, that spiralling embrace                that tracks the Sun to its nest, which a drunken death shatters... Fecund and widowed she glides languid.

Ave, regina... Are you hugging your spoils close?... Okay! Okay! What are your thoughts ? ... Love ...Enough of love, wise one: a gold fleck sped to the Sun.... a nest inside the Sun!... -  a plunge,terrible, a madchimera.

Pregnant, pale she glides.                                         The others, a silent escort.

"Return... the best of him with me, in me... Pull it out of me, put it away... like a spentstandard... I am still on fire, still..."            They extracted the standard.

DRONES:"Ave regina, among the death-doomedagain choose and enjoy..."

QUEEN:"O workers, those parasites,break them, the drones, sweep them-fat and slack-to the winds.                                             I had my lover at the zenith:intoxicated I shattered him."

DRONES: "Queen, the doomed wait chastely."

QUEEN: "Drunk I gelded and broke him. He fell from the height of me,-we almost touched the Sun-he spun down gutted like Icarus without his feathers. He fainted with pain, fainted with pleasure.                        And I did not faint? Did not empty myself, my wings never wavered? I am left to my perennial cloistered pregnancies."

WORKERS: "Left to her cloistering perennial pregnancies."

DRONES:"Ave regina, those who are about to die..."

WORKERS: "They bustle on the honey: now they are bursting."

DRONES: "From each one's 26,000 eyes they long for a sign from you: to the sky the sky!"

WORKERS: "They gasp for breath: they mount no petal."

QUEEN:"You drones..."

WORKERS: "Ssssss! they are growing drowsy, drowning in the honeycombs. The sky tomorrow, kind Majesty."

THE QUEEN MOTHER (unburdening herself):"The nuptial life,don't speak of it to me, friend, it's a lightning-flash,an instant's aberration,a madman's torch on the EiffelTower, a whirling match-headthat dares the Sun. It is...It is a soft looping down, of death.

And what does she have to show for it (the queen!)? My exploits! a downflow, a rush of eggs, friend,that never go to market: daughters and daughters and daughters, morethan the hive can hold."

Thus the old Mother groans.

THE WORKERS' Invocation to the young queen:"Procreate, great sovereign, with all the seed                             and the future of the hive. The panic and the prayer of us drudges weak, earthbound, inert tied to your leap                             on the Unknown."

She breaks the steep flightand the cruel kiss: glides, the sperm-case gravid, oursovereign.

Having soared that one time, she reignswith what she brings back.

"Queen, the celibate and doomed await your new launching and the sky..."                                                                   "I

gelded him shattered him.

He fell from the height of me-almost the Sun."

                                                                             She sees it again. Burns again?                        Around the queen who trembles dazzled, they massacre the plump male virgins.

And having soared that one time she reignswith what she brings back.She weaves... after her blue vertigo                                    shut in between wax walls, across the years, Spring does not pollinate her, no more glinting of wings,                                            perennial claustral half-shadow, she weaves thousands of lives

WORKERS:                                                  "eggs" 

thousands thousands of lives she broods and counts, and re-counts them, and broods.

The one time she soars, and the kingdom lives.

Semichorus OF WORKERS: "Penelope of a dead Ulysses (dead with dishonor.)"

THE QUEEN'S Lament:"All at once they eventhrew away my standard."

Semichorus OF WORKERS:- "A chaste Penelope of a dead..."

Second semichorus OF WORKERS: "Or was she Penthesilea in the real encounter with her Achilles?"

Love lifts to heaven, heavenly Love kills...

QUEEN: "... one is hardly revealed."

"One is never revealed..."                                            sigh from the hive.

(From the volume "Dibattito su Amore", Laterza)Translated by Ruth Feldman and Briah Swann

 AIR MISHAP

Inquest opened                           on three safety-bolts, six locksblown like cotton millipedes. Suddenly the door squirted into two metallic moths, they twirled at fifteen thousand feet,               fluttered down towards lily-white clouds,                                                     to a ring a glistening viscous field of Baltic Sea.

The eddy sucked into the oval void a pillow a purse a shoe and she was all but ravished: the sparkling, motherly grey-eyed one.                         Athletic arms flexed she gripped the oval trapdoor's side arched her supple belly terrified above those milky shrubs, steaming asphodels; a savage wind searched her flesh but all its fury could not drag her -vivid blood-down to that ephemeral bed of asphodels.                       Her dear companions caught her. The wound resounded in the ample bird,                                which spiralled downward. Smith straightened out at six thousand feet that son of a ... Through heaven a wayward radio rattled 'Save Our Souls".                              And the four hostesses arose in song. Windblown, grey-eyed Pallas sang, but tremulous within; the three companions sang blue-robed with her, beat a martial Christmas air from Ireland's glens.           Then, recovering in the chill, one by one a hoarse voice and a clear added to the chorus passengers, fresh from their brush with death. They wiped the frost from skin and eye, while little girls sang out, sang out to Christmas.

(From "Dibattito su amore", Laterza)