By Pier Paolo Pasolini, from The Selected Poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini, out this month from University of Chicago Press. Pasolini, a writer and filmmaker, died in 1975. Translated from the Italian by Stephen Sartarelli.

I was running in the muddy twilight
past decrepit railyards and silent
scaffolds, through wet neighborhoods
that smelled of iron and reheated rags
hoisted up — in the dust-laden spaces
between tin shacks and sewage
canals — on newly built, already
blackened walls against the backdrop
of a colorless metropolis.
               Over broken
asphalt, through clumps…