David Citino, Controversy of the Bells

An Italian priest vowed to hold on to his church bells
despite a court order to have them confiscated.—Reuters

The priest declared he’d die before turning his music
over to the state. Making too much noise,
the charge. The court order, he says, is the work

of disgruntled locals who live near his Church
of the Shepherd in the old Naples neighborhood,
people so unloving the tolling keeps them stiff.

Isn’t that the point? Fight the good fight, Father.
Loud as hell is sometimes good, rope, clapper,
those tones we feel deep in teeth and bone.

Toll away. Bells wake, make us pause, look up
to lights of other sites and times from wherever
we happen to be, and even if we no longer
hear the heavens of our childhood diocese,
our skies now cluttered with wires, ozone,
planes—not a damned angel in sight—

we need to be reminded of the magic music
we once expected from above our day,
as the final silence gathers in morning trees.

David Citino is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Ohio State University. He is the author of eleven collections of poetry, including The Invention of Secrecy, The Book of Appasionata: Collected Poems, and Broken Symmetry, named a Notable Book of 1997 by the National Book Critics Circle. He writes on poetry for the Columbus Dispatch, and is the contributing editor of a book of prose, The Eye of the Poet: Six Views of the Art and Craft of Poetry (Oxford University Press).

David Citino, Controversy of the Bells

Spring 2002