Nicoletta Arbia

Mount Sirino.

After many years I was back in Lucania
ready to touch again
the landscape of my childhood.

In the intense flute of summer,
in the heat,
I felt giddy and uncertain,
I held my identity as a jug
to be refilled.
I was so hopeful,
so grateful
to appease time past
by cradling with my gaze the indelible and pure cone
of Mount Sirino.
In winter it was covered in snow.
It filled the view from the kitchen,
so tall and pointed like the isosceles triangles I would encounter
in school.

If from the kitchen you could see a mountain,
from the lounge you could see a hill:
one as green and mossy as they come,
its profile soft and wide
slowly reclining towards a tumble
of yawning, slightly blackened old houses
I could only consider from afar.

Twice a day
I would watch the dark snake
of boarding girls
commuting to school and back
shepherded across the square
by long-skirted nuns
as black and white as their piano
and in my mind all musical,
all formidable
like the one teaching me to play.
In memory my mother flashes across the square,
tall and vaguely disdainful
decked in her grey suit
wearing a half smile
authoritarian and lost
commanding and fragile
lonely and uninspired.

The future was already swirling,
coursing through colours and shapes.
It stole the black of women in mourning
and the cloaks of old farmers and shepherds;
fashionable green loden coats and miniskirts
walked the main avenue,
in churches electric guitars shook up sleepy heads
and love suddenly meant never to have to say sorry.
I saw the Beatles on TV
exotic and yet immediately familiar.

As the decades chased each other
full of wanted and unwanted changes,
as I faced the future
and gulped it down,
I wore the tentative hope
of remaining undivided,
of rolling unscathed along its secret flank.

I am not unscathed
yet every day,
even around places steeped in death,
life shows through and breathes,
forever pulling me forward,
just like the Sirino:
a gritty, battered mountain
relentlessly pointing
to the Heavens.

Nicoletta Arbia was born in Italy and has been living in England for the last 42 years. She is a transpersonal psychotherapist and a poet. Her volume of narrative poetry Otherwise: 5 Myths of Transformation Retold in Verse Through the Voices of Women is available on Amazon, Waterstone online and in Kindle format.