The Aegean

The Aegean 

 This music has lasted since the world began.

 A rock was born among the waters

 while tiny waves chatted in a soft universal tongue.

 The shell of a sea-turtle

 would not have foretold the guitar.

 Your music has always risen to the sky,

 green taproot, Mother Sea,

 first of all firsts. You enfold us,

 nurturing us with music - threat,

 fable, hypnosis, lullaby, roar, 

omen, myth,

 little agonies

 of grit, of wreckages, of joys

--Maria Luisa Spaziani

translated by Beverly Allen

 

Born in Turino in 1923, Maria Luisa Spaziani was a prominent Italian poet and editor. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize three separate times in the 1990s. She died in 2014 at the age of 91.