La recessione [English translation]

We will see pants with patches,

red sunsets on villages

devoid of cars,

full of poor people

that will have come back from Turin or from Germany.

Old men will be masters of their low stone walls

as if they were senatorial seats

and the children will know that there is little soup

and the significance of a piece of bread.

And the evening will be darker than the end of the world

and at night we'll hear crickets or thunder

and perhaps some young person

among those few who returned to the nest, will pull out of a mandolin.

The air will smell like wet floor cloths,

everything will be distant,

trains and coaches will pass

from time to time as though in a dream.

We will see pants with patches,

red sunsets on villages

And cities, as large as worlds,

will be filled with people going on foot

with gray clothes

and in their eyes an appeal not for money

but only for love,

only for love.

The small factories

in the thick of a green meadow

by the bend of a river

in the heart of an old oak forest

will crumble little by little every night,

low stone wall after low stone wall,

(sheet) metal after (sheet) metal.

And the ancient palaces

will be like mountains of stone, alone and closed

as they once were.

And the evening will be darker than the end of the world

and at night we'll hear crickets or thunder.

The air will smell like wet floor cloths,

everything will be distant,

trains and coaches will pass

from time to time as though in a dream.

And outlaws will have an old-fashioned expression

with shorter hair on the neck

and the eyes of their mother

filled with the darkness of moonlit nights

and they will be armed only with a knife.

The horse's hoof

will touch the earth

soft as a butterfly

and it will remind what the silence has been, the world,

and whatever will be...