Churchyard

On the wooden bench you are swaddled
in green and gusts of wind
and the pageant of clouds passing,
the day glittering with emptiness
and the frank infinity of the air.
By the church walls and the shrubbery
sun and shadows clash like polished blades.
You face the lawn with the graves,
the blackened headstones
with the yellow circles of old moss,
you watch these time-spots and the best
you can know of the final rest,
the grass retaining a light of its own,
the large shuffling of the willows
and the tight rustling of the cypresses
whose green is so strong in the sunlight
that it becomes the dark blue
of the sky in the high mountains.

This wooden bench is where
you would always like to stop
waiting for your gaze to be gazed
but not expecting it really,
you would just like to sit and watch
the infinite air's ways
and the afternoon stretching into evening
and the evening into everything.

______________________________________________________________________

I am an Italian teacher of English, born and living in Venice-Italy, writing poems exclusively in English since 1993, they have been published in around one hundred and fifty literary magazines since 1999, in U.K, U.S. and elsewhere. Recently in “Poetry New Zealand” , “New Contrast” (South Africa). “Nimrod” (U.S.), “Prague Literary Review”.