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The book The House of the World has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and is now available on Amazon.

Carnations for Jack

Why spoil the red carnations
falling on the snow?
I have never gone there,
in that oblivious crossroads of death.
He never knew what grew
in the ditches of white,
dandelions, poppies,
perhaps roses against the cottages.

In the waste of the cold,
against the curtains
that covered the cannons of the tanks.
What did anything matter
except the silence of the snow,
the frost covering his face?
The disjointed love of his youth
being lost in a coffin of white roses,
blood mixed with the wine of his crucifixion.

I was in Paris months ago.
To the north was that place.
In that country of foreign names,
battles unremembered by children,
decades disappearing,
with the passage of ghosts
struggling on the roads.
Among them,
his young face ravaged,
his dreams broken,
in the black destiny of a winter,
where he looked into the whiteness
and saw stars exploding.

Published inIndex of all Poems