Don't Shout Anymore
Don’t Shout Anymore
Stop killing the dead,
Don’t shout anymore, don’t shout
If you still want to hear them,
If you hope not to perish.
They have an inaudible whisper,
They don’t make noise anymore
Than that of the growing of grass,
Happy where man didn’t pass.
Surviving Childhood
Surviving Childhood
1.
An abandonment takes me by the throat
Where my childhood still remained.
A sign of misfortune to be appeased.
That calling patient
Suffering from being strangled
And the fate of the exile.
2.
I still have some childhood left.
My way of abandoning myself to it
Is that its running out of me
Tightens at the throat.
Will this be the fate of exile?
And for my fortune to appease
Running blind,
The irrepressible calling you all the time
Strangled by suffering.
Wally Swist
Wally Swist’s (1953- ) books include Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012), Awakening & Visitation (2020), Evanescence: Selected Poems (2020), and Taking Residence (2021), with Shanti Arts. His essays, poetry, and translations have been and/or will be published in Asymptote (Taiwan), Chiron Review, Commonweal, Comstock Review, Ezra: An Online Journal of Translation, Poetry London, Today’s American Catholic, Transference: A Literary Journal Featuring the Art & Process of Translation (Western Michigan Department of Languages), and Woven Tale Press. Also, his translation of Giuseppe Ungaretti’s quintessential iconic first book L’Allegria/Cheerfulness was published by Shanti Arts in August 2023.
Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888-1970), Italian modernist poet, journalist, essayist, critic, and academic. Influenced by symbolism, especially the French-Romanian poet Tristan Tzara, he was briefly aligned with futurism. Ungaretti lead the experimental trend known as Ermetismo (“Hermeticism”), in which he advocated “a personal approach to poetry,” and became one of the most significant contributors to twentieth century Italian literature. Ungaretti debuted as a poet while fighting in the trenches in WWI, later publishing his iconic and possibly best-known book, L’Allegria. During the interwar period, he was a foreign-based correspondent, but after spending several years in Brazil, he returned to Italy during World War II and was assigned a teaching post at the University of Rome, where he spent his final decades. In 1970, he was the initial recipient of the prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature, awarded biennially by World Literature Today.
