REVERENTIAL COMPARISON

and a little before, the small flower shop. People don't stop.

Women look at themselves in the shop windows before night falls.

Behind

the half-built wall, in the plot overrun by mallows,

everyone throws what he wants-paper plates,

medicine bottles,broken cups, glasses,

rotted flowers.

There the old women and their dogs gather

to search among the heaps carefully, absentmindedly-they do not

see

the golden sunset; they search like poets for the poem,

the most bitter and forsaken crones, so happy

with a dry orange peel, with a piece of mirror,

with a blue tube from the drug store on which

the white tracks of the homeless snail remain,

and in the tube's cavity the sound of the train from Lirisa.