Mediterranean
Andrew Frisardi
The days fly by but the moments traipse.
Sing it, cicada, summer’s daemon:
How air is singed till the sun’s semen
Incinerates the mother of grapes.
Drifting glints on a brackish splash
Are seeds of coals in the sea’s brazier,
As breakers stir the everywhere azure
Into an ecstasy of ash.
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Andrew’s notes: “This poem, from my collection The Moon on Elba, conjures a lifetime of Italian summers, as a boy visiting family in Rome, going to the beach at Ostia, lit up by the July festival in Trastevere, where my father and his ancestors were from. It draws on the myth of Semele, consumed by Zeus’s fire, and of Dionysus, born from that annihilating ecstasy. The Mediterranean summer fills you with heat and azure, wine and light that remove the top of your head.
“The photograph shows my favorite beach over the past many years, in the Maremma area of Tuscany near to Mount Argentario.“
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