Red tinted wings
soaring over whitened
wintry steppes
Flocks of cardinals
murmur to the heavens
A dawn-winged damsel
frozen in the Cocytus
of a man’s maddened mind
One day they heard
her languid lament
A voice stuttering
silent syllables
Echoing amidst the veiled vortex
of terror and death
Whom does she belong to now
Who can now hear
the plumed flailing
of her vestigial wings
trapped in the ice
spattered lake of her infernal lover
And he
from behind his prison bars
whom can he say you’re mine to
Flocks of cardinals
drift over the brumal moor
They’ve left their crimson shoes
along their wistful path
Different lives narrating
the same story
The soles mirroring
the sorrowful souls of a hundred others
Their chirping dirge
fades lento away
tailing after a tarrying trill
A hundred cardinals
striking blood red
glide over the lake of ice
Murmuring to the stars
how lovely would’ve been
to live and love
For Giulia and all her soulmates killed by the knife of a man.
“Lame,” the Italian version of “Blades,” won the International award dedicated to poet Antonia Pozzi.
Anna Ciardullo Villapiana, is an Italian-Canadian poet. She tutors at the universities of Guelph and Waterloo.
