In Italian They Call the Bird Civetta by Robert Penn Warren

 

Robert Penn Warren is the only person to have won Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and poetry; he also served as the US Poet Laureate from 1986-87. His first Pulitzer in poetry was awarded in 1958, just one year before the Prairie Schooner published his poem “In Italian They Call the Bird Civetta” during the cool autumn of 1959. With an average seasonal temperature of 50.7°, 1959 fell in the bottom 10% of Lincoln’s coldest falls.
 

by Tory Clower

 

Robert Penn Warren

In Italian They Call the Bird Civetta

The evening drooped toward owl-call,
The small moon slid pale down the sky,
Dark was decisive in cedars
But dust down the lane dreamed pale:
My feet had once stirred that dust there,
But I see that Kentucky scene
Now only behind my shut eyelids
As in this far land I stand
At the selfsame ambiguous hour
In the heart’s ambiguity,
And Time is crumpled like paper
Crushed in my hand, while here

                  The thin moon slants pale down the pale sky,
                  And the small owl mourns from the moat.

This small owl calls from the moat now.
That other owl answers him
Across all the years and miles that
Are the only Truth I have learned,
And back from the present owl-call
Burns backward the blaze of day,
And the passage of years, like a tire’s scream,
Fades now while the reply
From the dew-damp and downy lost throat spills
To quaver in that home-dark,
And frame between owl-call and owl-call
Life’s bright parenthesis.

                  The thin moon slants pale down the pale sky:
                  The small owl mourns from the moat.