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ROMAN RUINS
Here is a memory, fragile and in danger of being lost, a dream of
a mother and her poetry, learned by heart. It evokes the old stories
and legends and landscapes of home on a different continent and
in a different tongue—mother tongue—ears and eyes of sounds
and images of words, language like the mother's body, that is larger
than the self, that carries me with it, bears me and re-births me
and sings to me a bittersweet lullaby...
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Schlaflied
Einmal
wenn ich dich verlier,
Wirst du schlafen können, ohne
Dass ich wie eine Lindenkrone
Mich verflüstre über dir?
Ohne dass ich hier wache und
Worte, beinah wie Augenlider,
Auf deine Brüste, auf deine Glieder
Niederlege,
auf deinen Mund.
Ohne dass ich dich verschliess
Und
dich allein mit deinem lasse
Wie einen Garten mit einer Masse
Von Melissen und Stern-Anis.
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Lullaby
Someday
if I lose you,
How will you sleep without
My whispering above you
Like the linden's branches?
Without
my lying here
Awake and placing words, almost
Like eyelids, on your breasts,
Your
limbs, your lips.
Without my closing you
And
leaving you alone with what is yours
Like a garden with a mass
Of
mint-balm and star-anise.
Rainer
Maria Rilke
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I
remember the old words and the old world, and through memory, I
re-position myself to create new worlds, to "dream of a common language,"..."...from
all the lost collections" (Rich, 1978; 1981).
Here
is a picture from those childhood days: a photograph of a mother
and a daughter, sitting side by side on an ancient stone wall, in
front of the ruins of a Roman settlement, famous for its mosaics
discovered and unearthed in the vicinity of their home town. I remember
sundrenched landscapes, summer dresses with flower patterned fabric
in favourite colours, elegant and airy, playful. There were just
the two of us, my mother and I, in the middle of a landscape littered
with ruins and mosaics, in the middle of history, stepping onto
the delicate stones, retracing the patterns of the tiles, evoking
names from the ancient legends I was reading about in school: Homer's
Iliad and the Odyssey, and so many others. I was fascinated with
the myths of the gods and goddesses of ancient Rome and Greece,
and I asked my mother to tell me more; I went to the library to
find more books, I couldn't wait to learn the epic poems about Psyche
and Eros, Aphrodite and Hermes, the winged god who brought the gift
of language to the human world. I loved those outings into past
worlds, made real by the mosaics, mixing the ruins and the reading,
the stones and the stories. The colours of those summer dresses
seem faded now in the photograph, impossible to keep alive, but
I want them to remain, preserve them like the crumbling architecture
and mosaics before they return to the earth. Writing these memories,
I journey to familiar sites/sights to see what remains, reconstruct
my world in order to build a new one.
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