andrea gibellini

Hedgehogs, Threshing Machines and More

Huge machines, phosphorescent red
in the June sun, dig into the hay already stirred from pre-autumnal
slumbers and thresh it, creating
survival music. That is the place
for vacation, above all things, inside all things,

today again they began to push through the ears standing high in the sky,
a centripetal accusative thrust where everything is reborn from the harvest.
In the sight of sunlit nature, first morning, then afternoon,

hurts the eyes, not because of sun
but hedgehogs cut to pieces on the road, its asphalt
clogged with the flight, at least four or five I saw
squashed in the slow, exasperated scampering that

was useless for gaining refuge, stretching to the maximum
that internal defence of skin and flattened shell of bones.

At first it seemed a large coincidence in the hot asphalt

where the motorway meets trunk roads breathing dust
expelled from the indolent plain: it was a headlong
flight not really en masse but individual, each one’s body

flipped in a different direction beyond the fields and the houses
where you glimpse other fields, other natures.


trans by n s thompson