Palatine Hill sighs
Deferentially my feet touch
the ancient ground on the Palatine
making almost no sound.
Yet like radars they detect
layers of whispers entrapped,
eagerly surfacing ghosts
from the depth of centuries.
Names dance in my mind
along with flashes of Rome’s origins,
shrill echoes of betrayals and intrigues,
giggles of extreme eccentricities,
visions of unbounded lavishness.
Fragments of influential voices
of Emperors and of their wives,
senators and leaders of the army
weaving the destinies of people,
of their own offspring
and of the whole world,
pondering the cruelest revenge
for the disgraced.
And for the unfaithful slaves.
Yet, at the core
of all of these whispers
I hear tunes of nightingales
filling my soul with visions of beauty
and conveying the aching sweetness
and the intoxicating passion
of love, of love ...
With a leap into the present era
I hear now my own shy voice
saying “yes” to my groom
of Norman ancestry
in the little church of
San Bonaventura on the Palatine,
built upon this history soaked hill
gaping right into the Coliseum.
A senator, a general of the army
a philosopher, an artist,
our wedding witnesses…
And suddenly my destiny
entwines with the destinies
of those who inhabited this place
in long gone moments of time.
Their sighs of sorrow and love
now raise the layers of dust
under which they slumbered
while waiting to join my own sighs,
deep, cosmic and endless,
rolling in alternate waves
of panic and ecstasy
over the forgotten splendor
of this monument
of human frailty and vanity.
Eventually
I resume my composure
to wear my nonchalant smile.
My sighs then slowly fade
into tranquility,
while their echoes
will forever roam across eternity.
*