Notti Bianche (Sleepless Nights)

After many, many months of being very, very lazy and not sending out any poems, I got off my proverbial duff and sent a few to The Lyric, a fine publication that specializes in formal poetry. It is, in fact, the longest continuously running (93 years) journal of formal poetry in the United States. I have been published by them twice before, and am very happy that they accepted my work a third time.

 

This is the poem that appears in their Winter 2013 issue. It was originally titled "Notti Bianche," which is Italian for "sleepless nights" (literally, "white nights"). I gave it the Italian title because it is included in my as-yet-unpublished collection The Distant Belovèd, but I thought that the English title would make more sense when the poem appeared outside the collection.

 

 

 



Notti Bianche (Sleepless Nights)

When even dreams deprive me of the face
that more than common slumber is my rest,
then I will give the dark to nights of white
and paint a wakeful rest on nothingness.

I'll trace the lines—so well do I recall!—
as slowly as the swing of winter stars,
and contemplate the histories behind
each angle, curve, and slope, the rugged arcs.

But only when desire's painstaking brush
completes the blessed stillness of the eyes,
will deep content take hold and wakefulness
become a prayer, the holiest of sighs.


© Leticia Austria 2010
First published in The Lyric and winner of the 2013 Leslie Mellichamp Prize