De Engelse dichter en schrijver Mario Petrucci werd geboren op 29 november 1958 in Londen. Zie ook mijn blog van 29 november 2008 en ook mijn blog van 29 november 2009.

Ambient

How easy for me, your son,

youthful lungs trawling in one sweep –

cigar smoke, omelette, the girl

next door. One day I told you

how in physics we’d calculated

each lungful held billions of atoms Galileo’d inhaled.

It took a full week

for you retort – as always

off the nail. Must be I’ve used it all then –

from Siberia to Antarctica,

slack-pit to spire.

That’s why each draw’s so bloody hard.

Left me speechless.

Till, catching you that night at the foot

of your Jacob’s Ladder, ascending

to the one bulb of the landing toilet,

I told you how I’d checked with sir:

You can’t use it all, I piped

not in a hundred million years.

You’ll get better dad, just wait and see.

Your mouth a slur, suspended

over your chest. Fist

white on the rail.

Don’t hold your breath son, you said.

Feeling For Eggs

You have given, and given, until giving has grown

into habit – so that you move to the stove

without thought, without word, the moment

the green of my jacket stipples your window:

ladle the soup that is always ready, rearrange

the condiments, or slop eggs for the beaten track

of an omelette. Sometimes, I can almost believe

you pass the day moving from stove to telly and back

again; or taking the one leather bag to the shops

for the loaf, the eggs you stow as though they might

ignite, two words with the butcher: was tender; was tough.

The odd hour spent in the husbandry of bills.

You hoard your knowledge of the man who died, left you

with sons: onion skin copies with their own

lives. You keep that knowledge safe, as though telling

might erase it. The pruning of decades takes your words

beyond the graft of mine. So, you listen, tolerate

the electric hotplate, the central heating;

were happier with the sooted cauldron twenty of you

could have your fill from, the firewood chopped

by your father, brought by donkey. You grew

maize from seed, knew how to feel

for an egg in the chicken. We sit in silence now,

with English tea to sip, some soup, until I have

to go. You follow as far as the empty drive, wave

as you stoop for a windfall branch,

add it to the wood pile you keep in the garage

that year by year inches towards the eaves.

Mario Petrucci (Londen, 29 november 1958)

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