Graffiti in Rome, by Massimiliano Nastri

Alexamenos Worships His God, by artist unknown (Italy) c. 200 AD. Justin Benttinen, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Graffiti in Rome
 
just remember that certain things will always be true: / half of us are used like mules /
 to carry the other half into oblivion; / […] somewhere the same men in the same uniform /
​come alive next morning / and fight again until cold night falls. 
SC Flynn, “Last Words”, Abridged 0-92 The Violet Hour. 
 
A man, crucified, with a donkey head – or maybe a mule:
Mocking the faith that worships a god dying like a slave.
A private visit to a famous graffiti, against a dark blue dawn,
Only a bakery is open, the bread hot, white like marble.
From the ground floors of the palaces upward, 
Only grates, princes having ruled in fear, with fear.
The Renaissance of clashing mobsters, 
All forgotten or, rather, just the half who toiled,
Beauty – beauty absolves the world;
Give us a masterpiece, and you will resuscitate a virgin,
Come alive and useful, a cosmos that transforms violence,
New but different, like the alleyways misleading the tourists, 
The soldiers, the ideals, the deities, the arcs of triumph, and
The bell towers presiding the ghetto. 
You passed a horse drinking at a fountain, 
The whip nowhere to be seen – yet.
 
Massimiliano Nastri

Massimiliano Nastri: "An ever-receding biography. I spent my childhood in a German-speaking village on the Italian Alps, something redolent of Heidi, the cartoon. Three PhDs: is it an achievement? I only have few and minor publications, two unpublished novels, and some poems I am very proud of on Ink Sweat and Tears, Honest Ulsterman, Cyphers, and The Ekphrastic Review – eternally grateful in this life.  I work as a teaching assistant at Queen’s University Belfast, where I am revising a book about the interwar collapse of Centre-right parties and the rise of fascism. Ominous and irrelevant together is a rare feature, indeed. Fifty years old, still swimming – slower and slower."