Interregnum

After so many words no more words would come. All the tears shed for Italy’s sorrow, the thirty thousand dead, the communities in the north devastated and robbed of their anziani, the medics and nurses laid in flowered tombs by the wayside of this silent war; the cries of warning we threw to the wind for those not yet struck, not knowing how the striking was so unforgiving of the old, the disadvantaged, the front line workers and those in the criminally neglected bastions of care and home.

Here in Italy we are in our interregnum. The artillery assault has slowed, the enemy guns if not spiked are muffled, distant and we feel some scary anxious sense of just that, just that tiny sense of release, of hope. We see each other now less with the dumbfounded luck of survivors and more with a wary eye: where and what were you as the storm raged?

The spring is rampaging here and would conquer all and drag us under; the spreading buttercup, the climbing ivy, the swarming cleaver, and entangling old man’s beard.

Winter’s barren slopes are tumbling greens, the high meadows a sheen of shifting silken grass, the ploughed fields deeper still with almost emerald wheat and soft eared potato haulms.

The nights belie the weather gone; the frosts; the unending gripping cold; the tramontana making ancient beams shudder and shutters quake.

A big moon rises over La Verna and the first cicadas tentatively sing. The streams flow with spring rain. And if as from the very earth itself the the bubbling notes of nightingales float upon the still night air.

May the gods watch over us all in this no-man’s land where such sadness has been wrought, where the life we knew has foundered and where so many loved ones have been lost.