A Poem by Bryan Murphy

The Biennale Hits Turin

The joy of seeing!
Take out your lenses and put in ours.
We do, and our sight is suffused
with colour, vitality,
hope, humour, irony,
imagination cubed,
self-indulgence concentrated.
Discoveries: arrangement as art,
critic as curator, curator as artist,
a city-shifting installation, with temperament.
Sneaked in
on unannounced artists-only day,
we try to look the part,
myself under beard and Borsalino,
Qing as a lightweight Yoko,
clearly from east of Empoli,
so who’s to tell?
Visitors too are exhibits,
we’re not alone,
though challenged more than most
to tune our reason and emotion
into this antidote to TV,
into exhibits that epitomise local individualism,
screaming look at me,
in this window on the world
in a space isolated from the world
and its residual warmth,
till we are frozen into leaving early,
back into the drab,
unseeing city:
how did this produce that?
We know again,
if this is Italy,
it’s good to be here.

Bryan Murphy is a former teacher and translator who now concentrates on his own words. He divides his time among England, Italy, the wider world and cyberspace. He is the author of the e-books Murder By Suicide, Linehan’s Trip and Goodbye, Padania, and welcomes visitors at: http://www.bryanmurphy.eu/