Dear Keats
I don’t know where to start
To tell you all the things you pushed me to create
One evening
A pure game of imagination
I thought my romantic soul should have an assonant name to yours
Joan Quille was born.
I am surrounded by the mountains,
Where you gave me a pen
William passed a yellow ink
An I wrote melodies that absurdly have returned to your hands
A sunset on a park
A river bridge
Between me and flashbacks
Dragging me back and forth, forth and back
I have questions inside
Why here?
Why now?
Why a meadow of daffodils that I read back in my sixteens?
Why did you give me all of that?
Finding myself paying the price, explaining them
To foreign horizons
That lead me in no direction?
I’ve been lying on the grass
I’ve made so many mistakes
I learned and unlearned what it means to rationalise
Dear Keats,
if you really whispered to me in a Trentino university library
To what future should I have returned your Odes
Tell me if mine was not a dishonest gesture
And sing to me in verse, in rhyme
If this story of ours
Is destined, once again
To disappear in the rain.
… but those unheard are sweeter.