L’Estate Che Ci Aspetta
Le colline di Alassio, i sensi che languono, il destino comune, la felicità che verrà. Sei poeti hanno composto queste preghiere laiche pensando all’Italia e al mondo. In esclusiva per Vogue.
ROBERT MONTGOMERY Poem for Lombardy
The sacred ancient spires of Lombardy oversee a quiet prayer where jazz plays from the balconies and the birds come back to whisper to us their memories of the mountains.
I remember the fireflies in the hills above Alassio and the red chairs we sat in all that August.
The sacred ancient spires of Lombardy oversee a quiet prayer where the airplanes are silent now the trees run around in hysteric oxygen the trees rampage all night and spraypaint the buildings. I remember the laughter in the cafe by the railway station and sharing cigarettes walking drunkenly through the streets of Brera arm in arm.
The sacred ancient spires of Lombardy oversee a quiet prayer where the stockmarket crashes again and again each night on television silent glass implosions until the stockmarket doesn't matter anymore all that matters is to hold the ones you love and stay safe. I remember we said we all needed to stop and realign what really matters.
Money is not a truth, money is a superstition.
Later, after this quiet prayer is held long enough to appease the gods the joyous roads of Liguria will sweep again down towards the sea the summer waits in olive groves and the sacred greenhouses of Savona where summers flowers begin to grow, unstopped.
We will throw our legs in the sea again, we will feel the wind chill a little on our skin again as the sun sets on the beach at Laigueglia and sends us up to the square for dinner.
KAI-ISAIAH JAMAL
A hard world, demands us to keep soft
In a world that’s asks us to touch, but a time that begs us to not may we find a way to instead take time to be touched. By the non physical, observation can too be a ritual. Praise to the portable paradises we will find that we did not even peer at before.
Where our bodies are filled with empathy and not not just fear and finger pointing.
What I am saying is—
May we find a way of being undone in a time that asks us to stop doing.
Moulding a world that we want to live in whilst we can’t actually live within it.
Where there is enough for everyone always, Especially those that need.
Where greed can be stripped off down to the ankles. A world where we restore dreams
And recall hope, maybe finds a new thing to call it. Where we fear loneliness only
And not to be alone, or away
For enough days to have enough love for the both of us. For the all of us.
A world where there is time to think
And sit but not sink because there is
Enough of us equally alone to know
That we can only verge on the brink of silence.
But we are all breathing, so there is in fact
Enough noise in the world.
A world where we make peace with the slow and the slowing, and showing and sharing and coming to and not coming in and caring.
A world where we have to talk because nothing can be taken only on proximity.
Willing be, praise to all the words pushed off bottom lips.
To all the anticipated kisses and twirling ankles that are still to come.
There is still to come — that is what is most easy to forget.
I sit, watching on a gleaming screen; the couple lean, fall into each other live in that moment only inside the alcove of another.
Two bodies mimic two bodies
Cheek to cheek, feet in step with feet.
A treat to watch on the largest stage of the social solar system. Dancing in the evening in only the way Italians could
And we believe again in how a body can become home for another body, Even more so in a time of the isolated and the aching.
May this time, gift us enough time to watch —
If nothing else.
May this time, give us time to see.
Praise to the humanity that will evolve even under uncertainty, universal urgency,
Nervously, we exist in times of the virtue of the virtually.
We will watch it create these tender moments
That will shape history, most certainly.
YRSA DALEY-WARD Untitled
You sit in bed. Tepid. Folding, in the middle of the day. You tell yourself that no one else is doing this. The good people of the world are doing something more immediate, productive, winning - and those ones who are are better than you and the ones who aren’t might be the same, or worse and everything is low, low, slow moving or halted… but here you are, remember nursing a planet body, ever-changing. You are here, just gathering colour. Here you are, ripening. A harvester of ideas. A container for possible good things. Here you are, red cells working hourly; new blood being made, a moving heart. This is rest. Step out of your way.
JEREMY REED Sleeplessness
I used to fear the dark as palpable, not luminous at its interior, but learnt to know its inner dialect, like just today these shocking pink anemones are joined by frilly indigo and red
I’d forgotten all winter underground their extravagant colour swatch of silks like patterns thrown across a kimono we confuse for the wearer’s skin mistaking pigment for bold yellow chrysanthemums. All night I’d listened to low drone of planes as muffled sky traffic, familiarised myself with plans conceived for the next day as though already done, and learnt in this the art of being ahead and not behind rotation into day, and knew in time sleep would return, but only different for knowledge gained of its alternative, the comfort of communion with the self, and went outside at 6am, the sky orange, turquoise and black, and they were there, anemones, a solo purple one new to the rest, affirming its passage out of the dark into rewarding light.
Il poeta britannico sessantanovenne Jeremy Reed ha pubblicato oltre 50 opere in 25 anni e annovera Björk e il compianto JG Ballard tra i suoi più grandi fan. Insonne di lunga data, ha scritto questa poesia alle 5 del mattino per dare conforto a chi giace sveglio in preda alla paura. Un’ode agli anemoni del suo giardino che si schiudono – fiori che si fanno strada dall’oscurità per sbocciare nella luce.
GRETA BELLAMACINA Poem for Italy
When you wake in the morning salvation will find you, in corners all over the world.
Come towards the window let your dreams witness the century.
Sunlight resting on old stone, to be the last child of paradise, a new spring garden promise.
To be, in the watch of the unread light.
Women who are trees lean in your soul bending like music chords to the sound of embrace. The city— a saint lamp in your grace, a new quartered stillness in ash imaginings.
All of your heart made into a set of spoons filled in like a kitchen drawer, comforting and full of the market.
Returning back to the things that hold you and intrigue you,
like the virtue of water, like the painted sun gods left to dry and the collection of heads that all lay beside you broken before dawn, telling you it is alright…
and the stars that are miracles after all shouting at the sun, rising in high hopes forgiving the moon.
Poetessa, regista, attrice e modella, la ventinovenne Greta Bellamacina ha fatto conoscere la sua voce come poet-in-residence dello Chateau Marmont, è entrata nella rosa di candidati per il titolo di Young Poet Laureate of London e ha intessuto le sue parole nella delicata trama della collezione Valentino A/I19. In questa poesia regala la propria voce come luce di speranza per l’Italia.
JAMES MASSIAH Pray Days Change
Do It by Dizzee Rascal
And Brand New Day both come to mind Tempman’s “Sticky Businezz” freestyle on YouTube too There’s definitely others
Maybe Doorway by Wiley
Actually
Definitely
Doorway by Wiley
I think about other songs too
Other tunes
That do what they do
To me
I hope they do what they do
To you
Too
(Special mentions for Jadakiss, YMO, Dillinger, Warpaint and Meridian Crew)
James Massiah è un poeta della parola orale e performer che integra i codici della letteratura con la vita notturna e la musica per andare oltre i confini e unire le persone. Avendo lavorato con i nomi più prestigiosi, dalla Tate alla BBC, da Burberry a Dazed, Massiah è a proprio agio nel parlare di Albert Camus come nell’animare un party fino alle 6 del mattino. In “Pray Days Change” usa i suoi versi poetici per condividere le canzoni che gli danno conforto, nella speranza che possano fare lo stesso con voi.