By A Swimming Pool Outside Syracusa Comments

NAH BORING TO SHORT YOU NEED A LONGER ONE JT! }+_{ +_+ X_X LOL

NAH BORING TO SHORT YOU NEED A LONGER ONE JT! }+_{

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this is not i want so you better change this now thank you so much so i want a poem

this did not help me at all

Short but didn't really help me.

What should I write if my ballad’s topic is swimming.

Short but nice poem

Now that is awesome how he trusts the reader to understand without having to have it broke down in words of one syllable! Great understatement and humor

here we are, just imagine the scene with roberto and giuseppe, chissà che si saranno detti, but this poem so humorous is quite serious reflection about language, instead (and great laughing pleasure, also)

And this site has the copyright license to publish Collins' poems, I take it? Saying 'we'll take it down if he asks us to' is to act in bad faith.

After struggling to communicate with family members today I turned to poetry and found this. Humorous, calming, clever. Thanks, Billy.

Well, the problem is easily fixed - by including the whole thing in this comment. All afternoon I have been struggling to communicate in Italian with Roberto and Giuseppe, who have begun to resemble the two male characters in my Italian for Beginners, the ones who are always shopping or inquiring about the times of trains, and now I can hardly speak or write English. I have made important pronouncements in this remote limestone valley with its trickle of a river, stating that it seems hotter today even than it was yesterday and that swimming is very good for you, very beneficial, you might say. I also posed burning questions about the hours of the archaeological museum and the location of the local necropolis. But now I am alone in the evening light which has softened the white cliffs, and I have had a little gin in a glass with ice which has softened my mood or— how would you say in English— has allowed my thoughts to traverse my brain with greater gentleness, shall we say, or, to put it less literally, this drink has extended permission to my mind to feel—what's the word? — a friendship with the vast sky which is very—give me a minute—very blue but with much great paleness at this special time of day, or as we say in America, now.

According to the version in my copy of 'Nine Horses', this is only the first few lines of a much longer and much more evocative poem.

goodness i know the feeling well...after teaching english to italians for 20 odd years i now speak english in the same strange way that they do