He spent his life between sit-ins, flash mobs, chalks and notebooks, training courses and battles for the rights of school workers. But this time Andrea Degiorgi, a historic face of Cobas Cagliari, chose another form of struggle: poetry. An elegant and gentle weapon, which collects years of verses written between an assembly and a union consultancy.

The result is a book with a title that already rhymes: "Versi persi e poi riemergersi", presented in recent days at the Cobas Cagliari headquarters in via Santa Maria Chiara, in Pirri .

Degiorgi, 68 years old, from Cagliari, a philosopher and retired teacher, has decided to give form and order to a poetic production cultivated almost quietly, as an antidote to stress.

"I wrote for fun and for affection," he says. "Sometimes for a birthday, an anniversary, a trip. My verses traveled through messages, emails, scattered sheets of paper. Now I have collected them and finally printed them."

The volume was edited by Marcella Catignani, also a teacher and writer, who selected the poems, dividing them into six thematic sections: birthdays, holidays, school, other occasions, travels and places, de senectute.

Each section contains Degiorgi's world: ironic, thoughtful, self-deprecating. There is the playful dimension of rhyme, the taste for wordplay, the echo of the English tradition of nonsense. But there is also the "serious" lightness of someone like Calvino, who knows that to face the weight of the world, you also need the ability to look at it from another angle.

The book also has a charitable mission: all proceeds will be donated to the Toadd association, which supports the Scuolina di Addis project, a small nursery school in the poor suburbs of the Ethiopian capital.

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