From Cedi la Strada Agli Alberi

Franco Arminio (b. 1960)

Translated by Sarah Lambert-Porter

We need farmers,
poets, people who know how to make bread,
who love trees and recognize the wind.
More than a year of growth,
it would take a year of attention.
Attention to those who fall, to the sun which is
born
and which dies, to the kids who grow up,
attention also to a simple lamppost,
to a peeling wall.
Today to be revolutionary means removing
more than adding, slowing down more than
speeding up,
it means giving value to silence, to light,
to fragility, to sweetness.

From Arminio’s book Cedi la Strada Agli Alberi (Give Way to the Trees)

Image: The peppertree at Sherman Gardens in Corona del Mar.