Viviana Florentino - Names (Italy/Ireland)

from #BreakTheBias by Various

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about

Viviana Fiorentino is Italian and lives in Belfast. She teaches Italian and facilitates creative writing workshops for cultural minorities (Quotidian Word of the Street Ltd). Her poems appeared in anthologies (Dedalus Press, Salmon Poetry, Arlen House) and literature magazines (i.e. Italian Poetry Review, The Blue Nib, Honest Ulsterman, The Trumpet). In Italy, she published two poetry collections (Controluna Press, Zona Contemporanea) and a novel (Transeuropa Press). She is board member of the Irish PEN and Le Ortique, an initiative to rediscover forgotten women artists. Viviana also co-founded the activist poetry initiative Letters With Wings.She is a recipient of SIAP grants from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

leortique.wordpress.com
wingsletters.wordpress.com
Project Facilitator at quotidian.ie
Supported by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland

lyrics

NAMES

When we arrived on the island
the land had the same colour of the sky
so blue we thought
we were standing on the skin of the Earth.

On the road to the new house,
wild herbs and a yellow flower with a name
meaning the first: Primula, Linnaeus called it,
or the earliness of flowering or the immediate blossoming

after the disappearance of snow.

In the garden plants were waiting for the end of winter
pollens were embedded in the soil:
a prehistory of death recycling new beginnings;
a bulb in the clods had a raindrop on its folded green stem

an immortal trace made mortal by light.

We too adapted to dying back and regrowing the next season.
We got new names and a raindrop folded in the mind,
a memory keeper in the planet archive
the ultimate cell beyond names

a survivor embryo moving between worlds