Tag Archives: Rome

Chief Dog Poop and his Braves

15 July 2020

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I don’t think I am the only person to have thought once or twice that it would be nice to have a name like the ones you hear in Westerns: Soaring Eagle, say, or Jumping Raccoon. In one film, of which I remember nothing else, one of the characters said that Native American children were given names on the basis of the first noticeable thing spotted after their birth. I don’t know if that is true, but if it is, it means that in Central Rome, where I live, there would be no chance of being called Soaring Eagle, because there are no eagles, not even drooping ones.

But if I were a member of a native tribe here and the criterion used was the one described, the roll-call of our braves would go something like this:

 

Crazy Scooter

Sitting Drunk

Missing Cobblestone

Slice of Pizza

Singing Postman

Double Parking

Noisy Seagull

Noisy Crow

Never-arriving bus

Smell of Frying

Chiming Bells

Silly Postcard

Police Siren

Smell of Coffee

Imperturbable Rat

Hanging-in-the-street Washing

Broken Umbrella

Sudden Nuns

Dripping Water

Dog Poop

Cloud of Starlings

Car Horn

Everything-for-1-Euro

 

New Rome bus routes

7 August 2018

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This is the third time this has happened to me. I open the Rome bus app (Roma Bus), click on the tab to check the route of a bus (it was the 32 this time) and a screen appears with a map of a large part of North-West Africa. Are there secret bus routes running down, for example, the border of Algeria, Mali, Burkina Faso, Benin and Nigeria to a terminus near Lagos?

If there is bus of this kind what is its number: √13 ?

And what would it look like? Perhaps like this:

overloaded truck 3

 

Walking near the Roman Forum

21 May 2018

Listen to the poem here

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Below,
next to our feet,
the present
just about to turn
into the past.
The plastic bottles,
and the beer cans
from last night.
The cigarette butts
impacted in between
the cobble stones

And next to them
the newly sprouted seedlings
thrusting upwards
like minute berserkers
insanely charging
our enormous flattening
human tide
trying to turn
everything back
to forest once again.

Below
the surface
which we tread,
bus tickets not yet
decomposed,
someone’s grandmother’s
favourite brooch,
a pen which wrote so
wonderfully
that there was a person
who still rued its loss
the day they died.
And here and there
lost coins which might have
saved who knows how many lives.

Below,
the years crushed
into millimetres.
Beams, tiles, mortar,
and porcelain and building
stones and bric-
a-brac;
and midden, midden, midden
through metres down to
the ancient centuries

Below,
with the remains of empire:
columns, undiscovered
temples, mosaics and
everywhere that’s else
the ruins of a million
not once remembered lives.

Above,
around my shoes,
the future imminent,
constantly undoing
my oh so carefully
tied laces.

 

,

Phillip Hill 2018

 

 

 

 

 

 

The winter starlings

25 September 2017
© Copyright Walter Baxter and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.
© Photo Copyright Walter Baxter 

Listen to the poem here

 

In early winter every year
the starlings in their hundred thousands
come to Rome.
They populate the branches of the trees
from where their shit rains down
in abundance and unceasingly.
Umbrellas must be opened
as you rush across the road,
weathering their excremental storm.
They whistle, grate and screech hysterically.
I’ve always wondered whether
it is the overwhelming thrill of being a horde
which causes them to shed
so many city-stopping droppings or whether,
conversely, it’s the collective defecation
which drives them to this state of frenzied ecstasy.
But then, at once and all together, they
take off. They fly as if
a giant hand were stirring up the sky
and they were swirling foam upon it.
Great swarms arching
at breakneck speed
across the air
splitting and recombining,
in balls, bursts, spirals and abrupt
departing arrows,
Birds flying in all directions inside
one greater common course
so that it would not be hard to believe
that skiddily those flocks are shaping,
too swiftly for our earthly eyes,
the secret letters
of a text of revelation
high above our heads.
It is magnificent.
It is, it is.
A pity then that these displays,
at some point have to end;
the starlings all regain their trees
and at that very instant,
if you are thereabouts,
a sudden truth descends:
shit – it strikes you –
sometimes outdoes magnificence

Phillip Hill 2017

 

Rome’s New Traffic Plan ?

13 January 2011

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I keep on walking past this hoarding half-way down via Giulia, in the one ugly spot on one of Rome’s most beautiful streets. I always wonder, “Is this Rome’s new traffic plan?” Because that’s what it says at the bottom: Rome – Traffic and Mobility Action Plan.

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And I wonder “When is this going to start? It looks exciting. Am I ready for it? What is going to happen?” Read more…

Shipshape in Shangri-La

21 February 2008

(Listen to the poem here)




Up
on the Janiculum,
Garibaldi is riding
into town.
He isn’t getting very far,
but then he’s seated on a marble horse
and on his cap there rides
another rider. It is
a pigeon.
Down
in the city,
which he’ll never reach
more statues stand and sit,
some- angels – hover or
perch on ledges trying hard,
despite stiff joints, to have a
dangle with their feet.
But each one has upon
its pate, hair, hat or helmet
a bird of the same kind.
Cavour has one, so does
St. Peter on his helicopter halo;
and near the Forum
all the Caesars there are
kitted out
even Augustus with his nasty curls;
and if there were a statue of Columbus,
Christopher Pigeon himself,
he also would be captained by a bird.
So why don’t they throw in a
sculpted pigeon as a package deal ?
That way you’d always have one
which would fit the bill.
Or else, to those who dream
of living on
in stone
among the changing traffic lights
and blinking neon signs,
in parks and squares
their feet steeped in the alarming
future forms of garbage we
shall certainly devise,
I would suggest you take to wearing
a Pickelhaube on your daily rounds,
that headgear Bismarck and the Prussians
used to sport, a fascinating spike
protruding from the top. No birds
on that, I’d think.
And also it would make those
chummy gatherings on the White House
lawn look much more like
the thing they really are.
Or perhaps not, let us
not play with spikes,
the point of the statue,
it is clear,
is the pigeon
at its tip,
for I have never seen
a person look so self-achieved
or sure of purpose as does
a pigeon when it –
like a sherpa in some
shimmering Shangri-La
unshooable, shipshape
and shishkebabbish –
sits
upon some great man’s head.

                                                                                            Phillip Hill 2007

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(This poem is included in my book The Observation Car which is available from