The Burden of a Poet (Marcella Boccia)

The Burden of a Poet (Marcella Boccia)I was born beneath a sun too golden,where the air smells of prayers and bread,where saints weep in cracked cathedralsand marble crumbles like ancient regret.They told me poets were divine,that words could carve altars in the air,but I have only gathered ruins—syllables like broken relicsscattered in the dust of my mind.O Rome, O Florence, O Venice drowned,your ghosts echo through my veins,your statues wear my silent sorrow,your rivers know the weight of names.I walk the Colosseum of my thoughts,where gladiators of grief still fight,where my heart, an unchained lion,roars against the silence of God.My hands—two bleeding Madonnas—write elegies for the unborn dead,for the child I never was,for the mother I’ll never be.At night, I lie beneath Caravaggio’s sky,a chiaroscuro of prayer and plague,and dream of an Etruscan burial,where poetry is the only god left.To be a poet is to be divine,to burn like a votive candleand call it light—to carve one’s name into eternity,knowing eternity will never care.