On November 1, 2009, the poet Alda Merini died in her home in Milan. We cannot help but remember her and love her for who she was, for what she left us. Born into a bourgeois family in 1931, she had already written her first verses by fifteen. At sixteen she moved among the poets and critics of her city, loved and loving in return. It was then that she was struck by the first symptoms of the mental illness that would pursue her for so much of her life.
From 1965 to 1972 she was hospitalized at Paolo Pini in Milan, and she left us an ample record of those years' suffering, transfigured through poetry. And that was not the only period she spent in a psychiatric hospital. Yet her genius and her vital force never abandoned her. She published numerous collections of verse and works of prose, and is considered one of the strongest voices in Italian poetry. She received prestigious prizes and was even nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Countless things have been written about her and her work, both while she lived and at the moment of her death. Now, in our small magazine, we want to recall what made her special—what makes her particularly dear to us: her refusal to conform, her indifference to respectability, her trust in friendship, her material poverty and the inexhaustible wealth of her passion for love. Love that she gave, love that she sought. Love for the men in her life, and love that drove her toward a passionate search for God, for Christ His Son, for Mary—exalted and invoked with fervor as a woman and mother who knows the sorrow of all women and all mothers.
In a small book she titled Corpo d'amore: Un incontro con Gesù (Body of Love: An Encounter with Jesus), Merini evokes with exceptional visionary power the figure of Jesus of Nazareth. She invokes him with expressions of love that are almost earthly and at the same time mystical—this man, son of man, fragile and mighty, uncomfortable and good, stubborn and compassionate, "torch of love" and "flame that melted all the glaciers of the universe."
In the preface, theologian Gianfranco Ravasi writes: "In these songs the soul of the Poet is laid bare—she who embraces the crucified Christ as Mary Magdalene does in certain depictions of Calvary." And Merini herself, in her inner history, feels akin to Veronica: "I walk through you at every hour / and I am there in a corner of the street / and I wait for you to pass. / And I have a veil, my love, / that no one has ever touched, / to wipe your face."
Among the many beautiful poems she wrote, we have chosen one as a prayer, which you will find on the back cover of this issue.
Pennablu, 2009