La prima fa riferimento al casco utilizzato dal pompiere, immagine che riporta quindi, in questo caso, all'incendio di Boston del 9 novembre. La poesia cerca di esaltare l'eroismo dei pompieri, che hanno cercato di salvare più persone e limitare i danni alla città stessa; allo stesso tempo è come un canto di solidarietà umana.
HELMET
"Bobby Breen's, His Boston fireman's gift
With BREEN in scarlet letters on its spread
Fantailing brim,
Tinctures of sweat and hair oil
In the withered sponge and shock-absorbing webs
Beneath the crown -
Or better say the crest, for crest it is-
Leather-trimmed, steel-ridged, hand-tooled, hand-sewn,
Tipped with a little bud of beaten copper...
Bobby Breen's badged helmet's on my shelf
These twenty years, "the headger
Of the tribe", ad O'Grady called it
In right heroic mood that afternoon
When the fireman-poet presented it to me
As the "visiting fireman" -
As if I were up to it, as if I had
Served time under it, his fire-thane's shield,
His shoulder-awning, while shattering glass
And rubble-bolts out of a burning roof
Hailed down on every hatchet man and hose man there
Till the hard-reared shield-wall broke. "
Seasums Heaney, District and Circle, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Faber and Faber, 2006.
La seconda poesia che vorrei proporre è una poesia di David Rowbotham, giornalista e scrittore australiano che narra, nella maggior parte delle sue poesie, di storia e come si può ben capire da questa poesia, delle guerre.
Guerre, che attaccano e tutti cercano di salvarsi, arrivando, quasi ironicamente, ad indossare un casco anche nel prato.
WEAR HELMETS ON THE LAWN..
"The world attack at dawn
Wear helmets on the lawn.
Most houses sanction war
in their want to save, from breaking,
garden and things worth fighting for,
with the fears of their own making.
Take down precaution from the wall
where it hangs, a too late shelter
for the house which, like a shell,
allowed and made the welter.
The host and the guest both look out.
It is the time for looking
as, in the shell of the fired shot,
emptiness is smoking.
The world attacks at dawn.
Wear helmets on the lawn."
David Rowbotham, The ebony gates: New and wayside poems, Central Queensland University Pres, 1996.
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