Fifty

From Turin they taught how to make a mail-order radio,
the grocer sold beans in sacks, olives in paper bags.
It was a sin to ruin shoes, to play football in them,
better to go barefoot. People shouted even from up close.
Meatballs in tomato sauce once a week,
cod liver oil cured everything.

The sun came in the afternoon, the sky was a hospice of saints,
the sea a Sunday stroll.

No one said: I have no words. He kept them all in dialect.
Everything was Neapolitan, even the playing cards.
The soldiers, not so much; they were Americans.
The lost teeth didn't come back,
the cold killed the elderly, February was the name of an
epidemic.

Among those I knew, no one was missing, there were no deaths.
The most beautiful thing to see was a ship,
the most precious was a bookcase.