Edinburgh
The great bridge did not lead to you. I would have reached you, even sailing the sewers, at your slightest command. But strength, with the sun on the glass-paned verandas, was already draining away. The man preaching on the Crescent asked me: 'Do you know where God is?' I did and I told him so. He shook his head. Vanished in the whirlwind, which snatched people and houses and lifted them up into pitch-black dark.
Translated by Dinah Livingstone
This poem was first published in its Italian original as 'Vento sulla Mezzaluna' in La bufera e altro (Venice 1956). The anti-fascist poet Eugenio Montale (1896–1981) was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975.