The Price of the Hours – Poetry by Italian Writer, Gabriele Micozzi

I. THE HOURS WE INHERIT

My grandmother had one hectare on the hill
above Osimo and eleven words for dirt.
Clay: it holds a grudge.
Sand: forgets everything by noon.
Limestone: the memory of animals
that never learned they would become stone.
She never explained any of this.
She put my hand into the February earth.
I was six. I cried.
She kept my hand there
and hummed four notes going down,
the same four to the end of every row.
I asked once what they meant.
She said: nothing.
Ask a vine what rain means
and it answers in sugar.
Ask a child what a morning means
and he may answer thirty years later,
in Frankfurt, at a whiteboard,
drawing his grandmother’s hand
for men who write it down.
The hill is a car park now.
Two weeks ago I had a meeting there.
I parked in Row F.
Eleven minutes early.
That, too, was hers.
I went in with my hands perfectly clean.

II. THE HOURS WE BUY

Two Senegalese women sat in our kitchen
for six hours, braiding Margherita’s hair.
She is thirteen. She kept her head still
while four hands crossed, tightened, released,
a loom working above her shoulders.
They sang to each other,
eight bars returning whenever the room went quiet.
I did not ask what the song meant.
I did ask what the braids cost.
I want that on the record.
Everyone wants the other poem:
the crossing, the border, the grandmother,
sorrow with a chair already warm.
This is not that poem.
This is a kitchen and a sum
that refuses to come out even.
At the fourth hour Elena came downstairs,
sat on the floor and asked their names.
I had been there all afternoon.
I had not.
Nobody was insulted. Nobody was saved.
At the end my daughter stood up taller,
her hair holding six hours of their hands.
She paid them. They counted the notes.
Outside, Osimo was already evening.
We had bought a hairstyle.
What had they sold?
Not six hours.
Six hours do not come back.

III. THE HOURS WE CANNOT TRANSLATE

Margherita asks what mo’ vedemo means.
Now we’ll see, I say.
She says: that’s not it.
She is thirteen and can hear
when her father is rounding down.
It is not we shall see, or let’s wait,
or any phrase I can find
in the English that pays for her shoes.
My mother says it standing up.
She said it when the shop went under,
and when I left for Milan,
chopping something, not stopping,
not once looking at the door.
It is not patience.
Patience is a virtue.
Mo’ vedemo is what remains
when a woman has run out of every other verb
and declines to sit down.
I try four sentences. Margherita waits.
Then: fine, don’t translate it.
Just tell me when to use it.
She says it back to me and has it:
two flat beats and a shrug.
She gets the tune before the meaning,
the way I got four falling notes
before I knew what earth could keep.
One day she will say it to someone
who never heard my mother.
If it survives, it will be because
she knows when to stand.