50
Trieste has a street that’s my reflection
when gloom and isolation fill long days:
it’s called Via del Lazzaretto Vecchio.
Amid old identical buildings like hospices,
there’s one note, only one, of cheerfulness:
the sea at the end of its side-alleyways.
Smelling of spices and of tar
from the desolate warehouses facing it,
it trades in netting and ropes for
shipping: one shop has as its emblem
a flag; inside there, turned towards
the passer-by, who rarely favours them
with a glance, their bloodless faces prone
over the colours of every nation,
the women workers serve their life
sentences: innocent prisoners
darkly sewing the gay banners.
In Trieste, which has sorrows a-plenty
and beauties of skyscape and landscape,
there’s a rise called Via del Monte.
It starts off with a synagogue, to finish
in a cloister; half-way up the slope
a chapel stands; there the black rush
of life can be surveyed from a meadow,
and the sea with its ships and the promontory,
the crowd and the market awnings down below.
Also, beside the rise, there’s a graveyard,
abandoned – they don’t bury
people or host funerals now, as far
as I recall: it’s the old cemetery 51
of the Jews, so dear to my memory
when I think of my ancestors buried, after
so much suffering and dealing, in that place,
all alike in spirit, as in face.
Via del Monte’s the street of sacred affections,
but the street of love and joy
is still Via Domenico Rossetti.
This green suburban neighbourhood,
which loses a little colour day by day,
always more city and less countryside,
still keeps the fascination of its fine
years, of its first scattered villas,
of its trees in their sparse lines.
A man who’s strolling it on these last summer
evenings, when the windows are
open, and each one’s a belvedere,
where someone sews or reads, waiting,
might think that maybe here his darling
would bloom again with the ancient pleasure
of living, loving him and him alone;
and the pink of health return to his small son.