The Light the Cube Lamp, by Massimiliano Nastri

The Third of May, 1808, by Francisco Goya (Spain) 1814

The Light the Cube Lamp
 
                                                  Si firmerà la pace barattandola colla nostra pietà
                                                  the peace they will sign, will be bartered with mercy.
                                                  Vittorio Sereni, “La pietà ingiusta”. Gli strumenti umani. My translation.
 
The light the cube lamp projects is too much to look straight at. 
A white kameez, yellow-turf trousers, eyes and hair - black.
Soon, the earth will drink it; soon everything will be thus.
The enlightened line has black boots, grey and brown uniforms - no face. 
The rifles’ deep eye-sockets are sufficient.
No one lives unharmed, and there are too many gods asking for sacrifices:
This land is our land,
They violate the chiaroscuro of our shrines,
Our women (where are they?).
Nightfall shellfire is welcoming the civil code, freedom, 
Fountains, schools, railways ...
The more one looks, the more troubling the phosphines:
The wall, or whatever that is: wide strokes of livid brown,
No shadows cast on there, but trampled by the squad.
Only one prisoner is looking at you – from the next batch, sideways.
Was he hoping to make a dash?
Demanding you to remember?
Later on, on the esplanade, the queue for the bread will be as slow as usual.
They knew from the beginning
“a peace will be bartered with something similar to mercy.”
When I am asleep, I can still hear everything.

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. 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. I am unsure whether it is more ominous or irrelevant. I am also guilty of an unpublished political novel, and of writing a second, to be equally unpublished.  Proud of having some work published on Ink Sweat and Tears, Honest Ulsterman and Cyphers. Fifty years old."