Alda Merini: 'I used to be a bird'

As for me, I used to be a bird
with a gentle white womb,
someone cut my throat
     just for laughs,
     I don't know.
As for me, I used to be a great albatross
and whirled over the seas.
Someone put an end to my journey,
without any charity in the tone of it.
But even stretched out on the ground
I sing for you now
my songs of love.


Tr. Susan Stewart. Merini (1931-2009) was astonishingly prolific: only Italian fans, of whom there are many, have read every poem she wrote. Yet she went silent, institutionalised, for twenty years. Which may be the subject of this poem. The As for me in the first and sixth lines of the translation doesn't have a direct equivalent in the original, but interprets Merini's emphatic use of the first-person pronoun io.