Improv(ing) - Week 3

from Contemporary World Poetry 

Prayer to my Mother
by Pier Paolo Pasolini

It’s so hard to say in a son’s words
what I’m so little like in my heart.

Only you in all the world know what my
heart always held, before any other love.

So, I must tell you something terrible to know:
From within your kindness my anguish grew.

You’re irreplaceable. And because you are,
the life you gave me is condemned to loneliness.

And I don’t want to be alone. I have an infinite
hunger for love, love of bodies without souls.

For the soul is inside you, it is you, but
you’re my mother and your love’s my slavery:

My childhood I lived a slave to this lofty
incurable sense of an immense obligation.

It was the only way to feel life,
the unique form, sole color; now, it’s over.

We survive, in the confusion
of a life reborn outside reason.

I pray you, oh, I pray: Do not hope to die.
I’m here, alone, with you, in a future April…

* * * * * * * * * *

Prayer to my Grammy

It is difficult to say in agnostic tones

that we knew so little of each other’s carousels.

Neither of us scrabbled the worlds we held

keeping our secrets, never even landing gutter balls.

So, now I am imposed upon to remember you

under false pretences, which you yourself exposed

only in a small book written in delicate script.

Never saying, never telling, never confiding.

You became irreplaceable but only because I

never knew what you were really worth.

Not that I would have bartered for another grandmother,

but I am saddened by the woman I never spoke honestly too.

I cannot place blame on you entirely, though I was only a child,

for our customized dance. I played my part

following your mid-western Presbyterian lead,

revealing with perfect granddaughter candor

a miniature carousel, a tinkling music box of perfected

rigid movements coupled with isolated tones played simultaneously.

Though you are gone, rejoined with Gramps in after-love,

your death is not real to me just as his never was.