You have to come from outside to understand
what many who are born and grow up here don’t.
You can spend years mastering Italian,
but when locals insert English words
into ads to come up with phrases
such as ‘shocking freshness’ or ‘shaking waves’,
when some locals are puzzled
at how foreigners love their language,
even the ones who don’t speak it,
yet come back to hear it in streets and bars,
when you’re labelled a foreigner,
yet have family close by
and both your parents were born here,
when you drink in a bar with a local
and the barista exclaims that you and your friend
look like brothers,
if your friend doubts such a possibility,
even when you’re both of the same region,
each fluent in one of its dialects,
you can only be yourself.
Even then you’re between two places,
inner and outer,
the most fundamental staying hidden.
This double life of not knowing
how the self would change if the richness
of two or more cultures
were replaced by the provinciality of one.
Dichotomies, never-ending,
finish with that knowledge
of being born in one country
and knowing you are present in others,
mining languages
to interpret their sonorous pitch
deep within
the identities they bring.

**

Edward Caruso is based in Naarm, Australia. Recently, he has been published in A Voz Limpia, Live Encounters, TEXT, Unusual Work and Well-Known Corners: Poetry on the Move. His second collection of poems, Blue Milonga, was published by Hybrid Publishers in January 2019. In August 2019 he featured on Radio 3CR’s Spoken Word program. In 2024, he co-judged the Ada Cambridge Poetry Prize.

P76 issue 9: Poetries of place/ displacement/ diaspora/ odyssey: On-line Edition. Table of Contents