This is a touching poem with no indication for the supposed "scorn of woman" voiced in one of their manifestoes.


Paolo Buzzi
The Fireflies, 1913

They flutter through the streets as evening falls,
darting from square to square
on their mysterious errands,
quick and quiet, each one a point of light
the women of Copenhagen
on their bicycles

What a fantastic show
of shooting-stars:
deep shadow, sudden gleam
in the dense foliage of a park,
fireflies they seem.
giving off an aura as of wood-nymphs.

They sparkle past,
heels flashing, ballet-dancers.
Try to catch one,
she will flit away, and leave a gleaming trail
just like a firefly.
followed by others, coming and going.

Night, and this city of stone becomes an arena
for fireworks,
a city of trees turned into a great, burning bush
made up of frenzied fireflies.
Earth and sky seem covered over with them
in a see-saw game of constellations.

Babies, little girls and sweethearts,
v1rgins, viragoes, spouses, mothers and nannies,
princesses and peasant-lasses, clerks and suffragettes,
who knows where their wheels are taking them, and their dreams?
Ah, universe, I think, they may be comets
that touched the street for one
bright instant with a flick of the tail.

---

This poem is more reflective of the machine-loving mentality of the futurists.


Enrico Cavacchioli
Let the Moon Be Damned, 1914

You also know, my love, the gray disease
of our century, that makes us go on dying
day by day, as though from the blue heights
we'd loosed the ballast of our joy,
and now the lightness sears the heart of us.

Mild sentiment of a benumbed bourgeois
wrapped in furs that never can be paid for:
yearning for what cannot be, thirsting for infinity,
the fever of tomorrow.
Obsessions hammer at our delicate craniums as thin as the skulls of kittens.

And politics comes begging our support
with her treacherous tongue, ardent and malicious,
and lying religion closes our wicked eyes -
if you want to live, go get a mechanical heart,
inhale the red-hot blast of furnaces

and powder your lovely face with chimney soot;
then shoot a million volts into your system!
You must make of life a computed dream
triggered by levers, the contact of wires.

And when your heart has become an electrostat,
and your tenacious hands are mean as iron,
and you can puff your breast up like a sea,
then may you vaunt your definitive victory.
If, now, the cold machine surpasses man,
in its perfection brutal and precise,
that day will come we rule the brute machine,
lords of the finite and the infinite,

and the moon be damned!