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 Tea with Nana by Mia Barkan Clarke)
Link: http://www.miaart.com/
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