Gift for a believer (for Flavio Costantini)

It is Friday, a usual day
in Italy, and you wait. Below
the street sleeps at noon.
Once the Phoenicians came that way,
the Roman slaves on foot,
and later the Nazis. To you came
the Anarchists chanting, “We shall inherit,”
and among them Santo Caserio
who lost his head for knifing
the President of France, the ambassador
to hell. Came little Ferrer
in his long gown who taught
the Spanish children to question.
His fine hands chained behind
his back, his eyes of a boy
smeared, he swings above the stone trench
of Montjuich. The wind came
to blow his words away, then snow
that buried your childhood
and all the promises, that rusted
out the old streetcars and humped
over your fathers’ graves.
In your vision Durruti whispered
to an old woman that he would
never forget the sons and daughters
who died believing they carried
a new world there in their hearts,
but when the doctor was summoned
and could not stop his wounds
he forgot. Ascaso, who fled
with him to Argentina, Paraguay,
Brussels, the first to die
storming the Atarazanas Barracks,
he forgot. The railyards of León
where his father doubled over
and deafened, forgotten. That world
that he said is growing here
in my heart this minute
forgotten. When old Nathan Pine
gave two hands to a drop-forge
at Chevy, my spit turned to gall
and I swore I’d never forget.
When the years turned to a gray mist
and my sons grew away without faith,
the memory slept, and I bowed
my head so that I might live.
On the spare hillsides west
of here the new lambs stumble
in the fog and rise. My wife kneels
to the cold earth and we have bread.
I see and don’t believe. Farther
west the ocean breaks
on cold stones, the great Pacific
that blesses no one breaks
into water. So this is what
I send you, friend, where you wait
above a street that will waken
into dark shops, sellers of flour
and onions, dogs, hawkers
of salt, iron, lies. I send
water to fill your glass
and overflow, to cool your wrists
in the night ahead, water
that runs like a pure thread
through all my dreams
and empties into tears, water
to wash our eyes, our mothers’ last wine,
two palm-fulls the sky gave us,
what the roots crave, rain.

Philip Levine

from The names of the lost (1976)