Alda Merini 💫

 

My mother would look at me and say:

"You have sturdy hips. You’ll be good soil."

Good soil, indeed. Good soil to be made fertile.

But I had a spirit, too—and perhaps my mother didn't notice that.

I was delicate and shy, and that full-figured body of mine bothered me. I would withdraw, wondering if my poetry was the same as my body, and my body the same as my poetry.

I wanted to be diaphanous, gentle, and pale. Perhaps that is where the trap began.

I am a being frustrated by madness.

The madness had set in just like that, one day, when my mother—upon giving birth to my brother—told me:

"You can't study anymore: the boy has been born."

In those days, the male child was sacred. The male child had to

absorb all the moral and physical reserves of the family and the community.

I had been studying—my first year of medical school. I wanted a degree.

For me, a degree would have meant a desk, a respectable job, and a winning smile for clients.

I wanted to be a doctor. When he told me that a sound

is born tragically from pain, he was right.

An obsession was born in me. And that obsession turned into poetry.

Beautiful, hendecasyllabic poetry—because I had also been forbidden to play music.

The mental numbness caused by the absence of music is incredible.

And beyond the missed scalpel, the missed career in medicine, I also missed my beloved piano. So, I resigned myself to fate.

I used to go to work on Via Verdi, passing right by the Garzanti publishing house.

As a teenager, I would sigh and think: "A book of mine, displayed in there—who knows when that might happen!" I had to wait thirty-five years—and I mean thirty-five.

Back then, I used to take refuge on Via del Torchio. Perhaps I became a poet because I didn't care all that much about poetry; Even though I devoured book after book, even though song was within me (but it was the song of life, and they did not understand that). Being a woman of letters did not mean, for me, not being a woman, and I would have liked to be a good mother, too.

Alda Merini, *Delirio amoroso*, 1989