by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, from The Pope’s Airplane, 1914

I come to you, Vulcan, to give back
the laugh
to you, sputtering, old ventriloquist.
Believe me, I’m out of your reach!
You’d snare me if you could,
in your coils of lava,
that luck you have with foolish dreamers
who climb your slopes
when the hypnotizing sadness of your monolithic sunsets
convulses into horrid, titanic guffaws,
and sometimes an earthquake.
I fear neither omens, nor menace of the abyss
that at your whim can bury a city
beneath a tumulus of ore and ash and blood.
I am the Futurist, strong and indomitable,
hauling aloft my wild and enduring heart:
and so it is I sit me down at Aurora’s board,
and feast upon her color-show of fruits;
or trample meridians, launch my bombs,
pursue the fleeing armies of the sunset,
dragging the wistful, sighing twilight
in tow behind me.

Etna, Etna, who dances better than I
pirouetting above your fearsome maw
bellowing a thousand meters below?
Watch me descend and dip toward your sulphurous breath
and dart between your columns of reddening clouds
to listen to the rumbling of that vast belly,
your heaving, gulping, deafening landslide,
your war at the center of the earth.
In vain your carbon rage
that would buffet me back to the sky!
I grip the flight-stick firmly in my hands . . .

I enter now, through the wide gap
of your mouth,
a sprawl of peaks,
and drop still further down
to inspect your monstrous gums . . .
Vulcan! what weeds are these
limp plumes of smoke
you nibble at,
like an ogre’s blue moustache? . . . .