E.L.F.

Prologue: four shadows go down the ridge of the hill by bicycle, going to the port of Edmonds. The gloomy sheds of the Nord-West Breeders’ Co-operative Society stand out there. Four bicycles slide in the night without moon, towards the pier. In their knapsacks three of them have a walky-talky with ear-phones and microphone; instead the fourth assembles a radar scanner to pick up the police’s frequencies. Far away, two more black shadows walk in the damp grass on the hill, hand in hand like two lovers. They’re sentries who cover their companions. After one hour, a terrible fire flared up in the Fodder Warehouse. One of the Co-operative’s sheds, used as a storage of the fodder for the nord-west fur-farming, was on fire, and the days after the spring breeze took the pungent smell of the burnt plastic. That night, while the fire was crackling, the cicadas chirped without stop and hundreds of mad fire-flies rose from the meadows; the wood insects overflowed from strips of land, from flaps of bark, creating whirling shadows. Meanwhile, a thin sound rose in the air, consisting of a million whispers, limpid voices, creeping bodies; the branches of the trees began to dance like waves of a sea ruffled by weakly currents, with the rhythm of a distant heart… The forest started to throb a monstrous presentiment. And the blows began to resound through the earth, like an echo in the subsoil, among the worms and the skeletons, down, in the dark recesses, and up there, in the sky…

Scene one: in a very ancient time, a barbarian king…)

Before the shadow drove away the sun and the wolves came out from their rock houses, the king rode in
the ancient forest. Ready to fight, with the fist closed, when the wind rose murmuring to the stars…

“We are the lords of this earth
Now the putrified sovereigns nourish our ancient roots”.

From the ground trampled on among the nuclear slags and the memory of the heroes a clot of fear emerged, a dark skeleton was sibilating the words of a gloomy litany…

“We are the lords of this earth
Now the putrified sovereigns nourish our ancient roots”.

Scene two: the rhythm of the industrial machines is a drum that marks the eternal cyclic scanning… and women and men dance frightened and motionless along the ridges of the time…)

The blood-stained sun died in the sea making way for the night! The moon rose like a neon skull and the trees looked like ghosts under its beam!

“We are the lords of this earth
Now the putrified sovereigns nourish our ancient roots”.

The king saw that every stump was a body and every branch a dry and bony limb! And those eyes… and
those eyes! Fire that burns the soul!

“We are the lords of this earth
Now the putrified sovereigns nourish our ancient roots”.

An echo is swollen with eternal sighs and endless ages, with exiled ghosts by those who usurped the
world… And the wind shook the earth’s pillars! tangle of horror was on him and wrapped the king in a
cloth soaked with coagulated blood. Everything was clear… everything was clear! Like a dream in the
morning sleep…

“We are the lords of this damp and dark earth, before the kings who defined the world and before the queens
dressed up with the oxidized gold that lies in the graves and the putrified sovereigns who now nourish our ancient
roots”.

(* To the poets of action. To the warriors of the silent glade.)