Wrought Iron and Blackberries
The knees carried the dark crust
of a run ended against the gravel,
while the courtyard baked under the sheet metal
and the smell of cut grass slowly rotted.
I was squeezing a blue glass marble
to look at the upside-down and cold courtyard.
The brambles invaded the chicken coop wire,
heavy with fruits hard like stones,
and fingers stained themselves with black ink
without asking permission from the thorns.
Two sharp drops on the tongue were enough
to feel the beating of midday.
The cast-iron faucet dripped slowly
over a dented zinc basin,
a thud of water that broke the stifling heat
while ants climbed back up the wall.
There was an entire kingdom between the woodshed
and the blind corner of the old workshop.
No one called from the bottom of the stairs,
the rusted gate stayed slightly open
like a promise that asks for no hurry.
Only the shadow of the sheds remained,
the salt of the skin dried by the sun,
and a pocket full of gathered stones.
Explanation
The starting point of the text sinks its roots into a childhood summer afternoon, spent entirely within the circumscribed and apparently inexhaustible space of a provincial courtyard. The experience is not evoked through a filter of sweetened or fairytale nostalgia, but rather through the tangible friction with a matter that is harsh, rural, and mechanical all at once. Memory manifests itself as a succession of physical impacts, pungent flavors, and solitary discoveries, far from any sentimental artifice. The child experiences the vastness of the world within minimal boundaries, transforming a simple domestic perimeter into a territory of autonomous and feverish exploration, where the awareness of the hours vanishes behind the sensory intensity of every single moment lived in the open air, in direct contact with dry earth and metal heated by the sun.
The central images are founded on a rigorous material concreteness that shuns abstraction. There appear knees marked by the dark crust and gravel, the blue glass marble used as a deforming lens and fictitious cooling against the heat, the brambles besieging the wire mesh with fruits resembling stones. The mineral and metallic element constantly dialogues with the vegetable and organic one: the cast iron of the faucet, the dented zinc of the basin, the baking sheet metal, juxtaposed with the cut grass that rots and the dark ink of wild blackberries crushed between fingertips. Every visual or tactile figure expresses the bodily density of growth, defining a space in which the minute observation of ants on the wall assumes the same ontological dignity as buildings and scorched sheds.
The development is articulated in four stanzas that trace a coherent path of immersion and leave-taking. The first stanza establishes bodily contact with the wounded soil and introduces the inverted vision of the marble, fixing the tension between sultry heat and cooling. The second shifts the gaze to the wild perimeter of the bramble, where the gathering of fruits turns into an almost ceremonial rite made of thorns and gustatory acidity. In the third stanza the scene gathers around the metallic water and the minuscule life of insects, sanctioning the existence of a realm comprised between the woodshed and the workshop. The fourth and final stanza broadens the breath toward the quiet of the advanced afternoon: the absence of adult calls seals absolute autonomy, while the heat settles on the skin leaving minute but lasting traces.
Lexical choices favor a plain, dry language, devoid of gratuitous preciousness but laden with denotative precision. Nouns belong to the world of solid and worn things: gravel, sheet metal, brambles, cast iron, zinc, woodshed, stones. Verbs evoke elementary actions and inexorable physical processes, such as baked, rotted, dripped, broke, stained. Adjectives are reduced to the essential and work through chromatic and thermal contrasts: the crust is dark, the glass is blue, the basin is dented, the fruits are hard and the drops are sharp. Vague metaphors or worn-out formulas of remembrance are deliberately avoided, preferring cutting analogies, such as the ink of the fingers and the faucet breaking the sweltering heat, to restore the naked truth of childish perceptual experience without any intellectualistic superstructure.
From a metrical and rhythmic point of view, the poem is composed of four stanzas of six verses each, characterized by a fluid succession of endecasyllables and long verses with a relaxed yet cadence-marked pace. The absence of a rigid rhyme favors a natural prosody, guided by rough alliteration dominated by dental, liquid, and sibilant consonants, perceptible in nexus such as dark crust, blue glass, chicken coop wire, sharp drops. The rhythmic movement mimics the heavy slowness of the summer midday, alternating marked syntactic pauses at the end of the line with more rapid flows. The internal caesura in clauses such as the rusted gate stayed slightly open confers a sense of temporal suspension, preparing the ear to a plain closure, devoid of oratorical emphasis but musically accomplished and balanced.
The overall meaning of the work lies in the celebration of childhood understood as a state of total adherence to matter, an epoch in which identity is built through small injuries, solitary explorations, and treasures insignificant in the eyes of adults. The pocket full of stones becomes the tangible compendium of that self-sufficient world, a catalog of shapes torn from the indifference of time. There is no nostalgic desire to flee toward the past, but the clear realization of a perceptual fullness that continues to reverberate in the present with the tenacity of dry salt on the skin. The poem thus closes on an image of quiet permanence, letting the reader feel the precious and mineral weight of an experience that has never ceased to exist.