#OVERTHERAINBOW
by Francesca Del Moro
Editorial
by Francesca Del Moro
Inspired by colours, the poems published in this issue shift towards the visual arts: painting, photography, comics. Alessandro Silva’s melodious lines become brushes that paint a rainy sky in pale shades – mirroring the railway station below, the sky is crossed by blue rails and clouds that look like locomotive’s puffs. Green, blue, red, violet: four colours of the rainbow appear – with other colours – in the refined poem by Cristina Bove, which is tuned with the breath during the contemplation of a lively seaside. Red prevails uncontested in the poem by Eva Laudace: it is the colour of the wavering hair of running girls, the focus of landscape paintings that unfold one after another, gradually spreading out until they embrace the sun and the galaxies. Yellow is the colour of the gloomy lines by Rita Stanzione, the colour of the edges of old papers that save memories, the colour of the lights that keep past emotions alive. Funny puns speed through Ugo Rapezzi’s poem evoking the seven colours of the rainbow one after another until they portray an absurd superhero experiencing an acid trip. In Ulisse Fiolo’s quatrain of unrhymed hendecasyllables, the rainbow is caught as it is born from the embrace of water and light, embodying the indefinable beauty of the beloved person.
Redheads
by Eva Laudace
Redheads
come from cloudy countries
running among female
foxes and fawns
caresses of the summer
or of a matchstick.
The warm air they open on the face
remains open
on the heads as well
on the flower mouths
on the games for adults
the bronzine powder
is an eternal childhood
swimming in the hands
a dancing innocence
distracted by colour.
And how anxiously they blow
when they remain alone
when they perceive the rain
when they lose their cheeks
silence is a wind
that slowly deflates.
Redheads
are not jealous of the other
Northern creatures
copper hair wax
animal beauty
can’t be tamed.
On the milky neck
on the tail and the ridges
galaxies are complete once again
mysterious freckles
may they be their secrets
that now can be seen
now become brighter
maliciously getting in and out of the sun.
Edges
by Rita Stanzione
I feel you are a river and I slowly move back
on the shore’s stretched thread
with my imagination I wash papyruses
of motionless and satisfied time
The resin yellow has thickened edges
of it-is-gone
where I skim the past, opening lights
in some crack of shelter
Spectacolour
di Cristina Bove
The scenery painted in aqua green
voices from the strand
tinge the blue of the weave
a sparkle of life on the waves
arches of light gild the sand
we are sitting with the sun in our breath
we perceive sirens in moiré
_their singing has strange coral tones_
an invitation to dream
in scales and mother-of-pearl
although the snow-white winter
is already performing its opal monologue
a touch of vermilion
flowers with smiles and pomegranates
the tarpaulin’s crimson velvet
will finally fall on the horizon
a last breath of violet
_we will keep memory of the sunset _
but in the polychromy of new loves
we will be born again
Pure
by Ulisse Fiolo
There’s a nameless beauty in you:
that one I love, shining through you
like the rainbow – in transparency
as water meets light.
Dazzling
by Ugo Rapezzi
After a yellow jellow
I took the orange drink
then go!
A Red Baron in verdigris costume
on a rainbowing bluemobile
I launched myself toward the indigo Indian sky
pierced the electrical violet space
and disappeared in the burst of a lightning.
This cursed rain
by Alessandro Silva
Cascina Gobba railway station,
park and ride
it’s a scrounging
of the misty sun
that only shines
this morning.
With the last steam
cloud puffing
on the blue tracks
of a sky I barter
a gentle drive
La pietà del bianco
A refined object, enhanced by the texture of the thick and matte paper, where minuscule words are carved in a dazzling white. The pages are kept together by a ribbon, also white, which can be loosened, to disassemble and reassemble the succession of brief poems in order to create new musical scores. A book – as Alberto Mori explains in the introduction – that lasts as long as a contemplation. That can be experienced as a sequence of illuminations, or as the practice of meditation that allows us to go down to an empty space we created inside ourselves. The blank space of the pages, conceived like Amelia Rosselli’s Serie ospedaliera, with whom Antonella Taravella shares the musicality and an enchanting sense of mystery. The black of the text emerges from the white together with many colours, either named or simply hinted at – the colourful petals evoked by the verb “to flower” in the dedication at the beginning of the book, the greens, yellows and browns generally connected to the leaves, the yellow of urine, the black of the hands, of a raven and of small circles resembling nightmares, the red of blood, of the heart, of the mouth, the red suggested by the verb “to set fire” and the grey implied by the adjective “leaden”. And again white on white, through musical and hammering repetitions that recall the reiterated red in Pagliarani’s Doppio Trittico di Nandi: the white of snow, of a dish, of the light on the walls, of the clouds… White is the colour of piety and silence, of the body of Christ, and is continuously invoked with religious fervour. To this “grammar of gestures” – as Alberto Mori calls it – the body surrenders with an almost mystical passion, while its details surface one after another from an immaculate marble: tiny legs, little mouth, skin, cheeks, the eye opened wide that waters, the throat, the hands, the skeleton, the flesh, the feet, the nail, a vertebra… The body is the protagonist of oneiric, surreal – and often disturbing – scenes, which on the one hand recall the cinema of Buñuel, on the other recreate the atmospheres of Samuel Beckett’s dramaticules with particular reference to the crazed confession of Mouth in Not I. The body moves forward through the white, like the migrants through the sea of milk in Crialese’s Nuovomondo, and the reader is inevitably involved in this journey.
Antonella Taravella, La pietà del bianco © 2015