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Ilaria La Commare was an Italian writer, editor of cafebabel.com (a most renowned multilingual European magazine) and an anti mafia activist. She commited suicide in Paris in March 2009. Rest in Peace. This is my tribute for this woman full of life.

This is what appeared on cafebabel.com a few days after her death:

Correspondent since autumn 2005, Ilaria has left us at the age of thirty. It happened the 17th of March in a blaze of desperation or courage, leaving her friends and family immersed in grief. Her life was full of activism, the latter being channelled predominantly through the medium of journalism. But Ilaria La Commare was not only a journalist. She was also an accomplished writer and a fine poet.

From her writing you can deduce a vein of nostalgia for her home region of Sicily. The simplicity of the words in her poetry bring us to regard her island just as she did. Colourful, with a maritime presence, lights, sounds and silence. These silences, graphically expressed in the spaces that she deliberately leaves at the beginning of some of her verses, are the most loaded.

"Water of salt in the sun". Its luminous alliteration transports us to childhood, in the hunt for a solemn and simple happiness. The presence of the verbs conjugated in the future predominates, projecting themselves into the future whilst weighing up the upsetting burden of today. The future is constellated with nostalgia, of a recurring past.

Our homage to Ilaria is a well-meaning translation of her "Linden tree grains", an example of her skilled wordplay and her prose of poetic strokes, both volcanic and original.


Linden tree grains

Linden tree grains
we will weave our summers
singing in the island terraces
deflowering the water of salt

we will burn in silences
in the day that breaks
playing with the sweets of water
under the sheets of threads
we will feel the vein
living out the voices
of squares made out of stone

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PS: This is a pencil drawing on A3 paper

tags ilaria la commare poet ben heine cafebabelcom italy cyberactivist mafia activist suicide writer water of salt in the sun linden tree grains dove colombe peace women rights tragic pencil drawing sicily sicile houx marco riciputi