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The Scorpion's Dark Dance/LA Buia Danza Di Scorpione

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Alfredo de Palchi's second book of poetry "The Scorpion's Dark Dance" is the first in his extant oeuvre, his first book was sent to a literary critic who lost it. The entirety of this marvelous book was written while in prison, where he was imprisoned from 1945-51. How fitting that there is a quote by Francois Villon at the start of the book. The competent translator and close friend of Palchi, Sonia Raiziss writes in the introduction, "De Palchi's poems are staccato bits of agony spitting out of his guts." The majority of the poems exceed no more than one or two stanzas & none of them are longer than a page, it doesn't matter. What a lot of poets might take several pages to convey, De Palchi is able to present in brief, powerful pieces:
A fanfare of swirling
mosquitoes in the sunset
and the world's a merry-go-round
a festival of snippets of light
---as for me, wavering
I ride this vertiginous heart plagued
by mosquitoes.
It would have been easy for De Palchi to have given up to total skepticism, especially considering the horrors of the twentieth century & while it seems that "the bullies have the last word" he persists in believing something better for mankind is possible:
I adjust my glance I count the years
years cheated regretted gifted
to ravenous Babylon

if tomorrow were only sure I could perhaps
survive the deep bites inside me
isolated---unable to guess what light
will give me strength---
meanwhile in this cubicle
coming of age I gnaw at myself
and scrape on stone for a different life.

It is this power of saying, "no/ no/ no" to modern society and history that turns these anguished poems into a fierce cry for change.