Amphitheater | Romeo and Juliet | Palazzo Canossa
Amphitheater
Field of sand, you sprang like one unblinking eye
from old Verona’s bedrock, built for spectacles,
where gladiators came to dice their wagered blood,
clawed by the jagged shouts and blunter moans
of customers who paid good money for the feast
of sweat and leather underneath a pity-weary sun.
The all-but-naked, soiled and stained combatants
who, before the bout, stood puking, white-eyed,
as the gates were swung apart, a chasm’s maw,
would stumble out to reckon with the afternoon,
and wonder if this time their blood would taint
the white and new-raked sand between their toes.
The mothers and the sweethearts of those men
whose value was resolved by parried blows
and counterjabs, by weight of armor in the heat,
and hard demands of training for the fight,
would weep and pray, weep and pray their love
to tiny statuettes of fine-tooled ivory in vain.
The space is empty now of entertaining murder.
Empty too the scorching bleachers round the sand.
But I can hear them still, who beg for clemency
beneath the sword, the thumb still level, poised,
frozen between the fickle poles of death and life.
They had no heaven but Elysium to see them home.
Romeo and Juliet
Are you that stripling who had hung
below this balcony, then climbed and breached
the tangled world of serenades and bile
from which return was never to be reached?
Are you the maid whose curtsy at the church
ignited in a youth such passions so combined
they gathered like an ooze of oil
to light a furnace in his flustered mind?
The centuries have cast upon these tombs
the silt of your remembrance in the play;
but mysteries of love would still persist if
cooler hearts than yours had found a way.
The dagger and the vial of venom were
the end to which you plummeted at last
and fastened each to each in death’s embrace
as your vitality abruptly passed.
But in these yawning graves no glib farewell
will comfort you for now you are apart,
locked out forever from love’s heights
by self-destruction and the squandered heart,
unless the God, whose love no man can guess,
is stirred to look upon your ruptured breast
and waive the awful terminus you earned
to join you both again in endless rest.
Palazzo Canossa
What princeling paces on the flags
beyond the tang-bound heavy door
that sports the narrow oak postern
where thieves might ply the skeleton
and, like a lung, purloin the very air
at dead of night, with all the house asleep?
And in the afternoons, what joy to step
into the ivied courtyard where a fountain
froths and sprays its never-ending mists,
a tearful eye, unblinking, hemmed by stucco,
and where a cool draft stirs the fitful dust
that mounts and drops like breathing.
Or in the moonlight peer through lattices
and watch the arum stalk the ground
below and stake its claim to every nook,
while ghosts of former bloodlines
tread the round of every wall in turn
and try the doors and windows all in vain.
Five centuries of living, dying, making
love and birthing dreams full of eternity,
among the ancient tapestries and drapes
transported here by merchants and the trades,
to cushion eyes from menaces of naked walls
and keep the bones from creeping damp.
And idle minutes that you pass, along
these narrow cobbles breasting the façade,
are yet replete with shocks of wonder that
a shaggy, lumpen face like that might hide
a young, refined but vital resident within,
with pedigrees held lightly in an open hand.
Sean O’Neill was born in Scotland, but has lived in the USA for the past 15 years. He has had poetry published in a variety of journals including First Things, The Ottawa Literary Review, Living Bulwark, Reformed Journal, Clay Jar Review, The Spirit Fire Review and American Literary. Sean has published 17 collections of poetry and is the author of five novels and four non-fiction books, including the bestselling “How To Write a Poem: A Beginner’s Guide.” He runs the Kolbitars Poetry Group in Lansing, Michigan, USA.