Deposits Made by History

A poem for Antonio Gramsci (with commentary)

Gramsci during the 1920s, looking into the camera through wire-rimmed glasses. For a critical discussion of this photo, see David Forgacs, “Gramsci undisabled,” Modern Italy (2016).

Deposits Made by History

for Antonio Gramsci

You drink languages and eat histories
as if words were substitutes for food.
Mussolini spilled your blood
while life coursed through your pen.

You posed the Southern Question
unswayed by defeat, perpetually postponing victory,
living not for yourself but for truth.

You made prose into poetry,
breaking with Hegel, you surpassed Croce.
Your fragile wrists poured over notebooks in a staccato
more rigid than the bars of your cell.

You are particles of shivering light
on the crossbars of smoky windowpanes.

You receive the deposits made by history
without the benefit of an inventory.
The task, you said, is to make that inventory.

You are the politics the state rejected.
Pessimism of the intellect,
optimism of the will.