Time for Harvest

To the house of the Master

I came to surrender the harvest.

Wearing his conceited bowtie

the crow welcomed me at the entrance

and made me clean life off of my boots.

Dead, but with clean shoes

I stepped into the long corridor of canvased faces.

And I walked, slowly

upon that never-ending carpet

the same that their fathers had laid on the bones of my fathers.

Once at the crossroads,

women’s laughter and spectral ladies

I saw passing through the walls.

It’s late, the crow said

it’s late.

Because there was a feast going on at the house of the master.

I could already hear the music and the steps of a mournful dance

denying the holiness of the night.

They hastily made me enter in the clock-room:

it was pointing to the hour of the surrender of the harvest.

I lowered my head reverently,

just as I had been told to do on the day

when they’d stolen the word from my mouth and the joy from my heart.

But who was I kneeling to?

It was odd that during all those grey years

I had not realized

that there was no Master nor there had ever been.

There were only two crows

in the clock-room.

They looked scared and ravenous

victims and executioners of a game

that was as old as that house.

I looked at them.

They looked at me.

And it was then that I sang my black sermon,

a sermon full with pain and rage for the life that I had lost.

An instant later I heard the foundations creaking

and much pointless croaking.

Because the roof fell on the crows, on the clock, on the ladies

and on the rest of that bleak cathedral.

And I, I who’d come to surrender the harvest

I made my way back home singing.

by Jason Ray Forbus

Le Messi

Nella casa del Padrone

venni a rendere le messi.

Mi accolse il corvo sull’uscio della casa

con quel suo papillon presuntuoso

e toccò pulirsi della vita da sotto gli scarponi.

Morto, ma con le scarpe pulite

misi piede nel lungo corridoio delle facce di tela.

Osan in Songtan

Your landing strips shine
under the light of the memory sun -
but I have never seen you.

Everything in you is sharp and triangular,
time too.


Young officers meet on your concrete ground
and talk, contradicting each other:
ancient tongues serving a new folly.

For you are the daughter of duty
and thus deny bread
to marry the thundering sky.

Osan in Songtan.

The echo of hatred rumbles beyond the border
while brothers stack bombs
on fields of oyama flowers.

The destinies of us all
fly on wings of steel
amid the clouds of a halved sky.

- J.R. Forbus

The Shisha Smoker

Hashem is a peculiar assassin:

he kills with his pipe.

There’s no anxiety in the smoke crowning his head;

it’s a shroud to fend off looks.

You can find him sitting at the corner

of the shisha-house

at every hour of the day and every hour of the night.

For his business, you know, is threading with fate.

Hashem knows all the words

that were ever written on all the books
of the entire world.

But Hashem can’t read.

He can talk, when he wants to kill silence.

Mostly, he listens.

-          - J.R. Forbus

Il Fumatore di Shisha

Hashem è uno strano assassino:

uccide con la pipa.

Osan di Songtan

Le tue piste luccicano
al sole della memoria,
ma io non ti ho mai conosciuta.