Anticommunist Youth Marches in Rome
If you shout long live freedom without humility
you’re not shouting long live freedom.
If you shout long live freedom without laughter,
you’re not shouting long live freedom.
If you shout long live freedom without love,
you’re not shouting long live freedom.
You, children of the children, are shouting
long live freedom
with contempt, with hatred, with rage.
So you’re not shouting long live freedom!
There’s a true freedom and a lying freedom,
but it’s better to be heroes of true freedom.
Know this, children of the children,
you who shout long live freedom
with contempt, with hatred, with rage.
*
Series of Atomic Explosions
– Dreams of death
– Drivel of maggots in eternity
– Ah, children!
– The mothers were monsters.
– Slow fatalities coming to a head outside the world.
– The convolutions of a will
that makes of itself a monument on the summit of the Oceans.
Will that has no memories.
– There’s nothing left, there’s nothing, nothing.
We have never existed.
Reality is these shapes on the summit of the Heavens.
– Class struggle, reason for every war.
– Subtle forms of cancer, weapons of class struggle.
– Tender green shoots of the plague, weapons of class struggle.
– Angry hissing of the defensive rich man.
– Cream of blood of the offensive poor man.
– Bourgeois brain devoid of the idea of class struggle!
– Heart benighted by the mystery of no idea of class struggle!
– Lids of the terror that rules the world, mange-ridden roses
of the war sown by class struggle.
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Excerpted from a first English language translation of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La rabbia / Anger, translated from the Italian by Cristina Viti. Available now via Tenement Press. Maria Grazia Chiarcossi, © 2022. English language translation copyright, Cristina Viti, © 2022. First published by Tenement Press, 2022.
