"Birth of Venus" painting by MIA BARKAN CLARKE, New York. "Dolce Firenze" poem by MIA BARKAN CLARKE

(copyright Mia Barkan Clarke)
(copyright Mia Barkan Clarke)

DOLCE FIRENZE

These familiar cobblestone
and narrow pathways
echo the songs of yesteryear.
I never needed a map
to know where I was going.
Air filled with espresso, basil, and baking breads
scented my tempted tongue.
These streets where
Michelangelo and Leonardo walked,
I walked and mused about
how life might have been
if I had lived here when they did.
My European pink-clothed body
with legs bronzed an olive brown
and hair golden-rayed and sun-painted,
I felt so good
without worry.
without question.

It was déja vu
the first week I visited you,
a sense of being before,
time and time again,
each for just seconds
but for seven days
over and over,
dizzying my senses.

Some call it La Sindrome di Stendhal.
I say it was a past life,
I, an Italian Jewess
before the Nazis
took me,
stripped me,
forced me into the cattle cars,
into the smoke-filled chambers,
into the flames and up the chimneys,
I waiting for the sons of Jabotinsky
to rescue me
to take me back
to my first home.

But not this time,
the odyssey of return,
not this time . . .

You cast a spell,
intoxicated me
with your baroque beauty
and the stirrings of memory
and dreams of times and places past.

 

Mia Barkan Clarke

 

(From A Tea With Nana by  Mia Barkan Clarke)

 


  Link: http://www.miaart.com/

 

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