FARMERS OF LOVE

Raquel Angel-Nagler

REMEMBERING PAUL ELUARD

LOVE, POETRY

1.
No matter what the poets say,
Love doesn't rise high, even though it fills your burning voice with smoke.
It sinks into the deep recesses of your body, warm from years of seeds,
It sinks into the deep recesses of what you remember, of what you forgot,
It erases all the other births.
And you don't know if it is love that chooses love,
How deep in has to sink, into which sea,
Into which age of coral,
In order to find you.

***

2.
Under the face of her nudity:
The eyes of a child, bigger than her face, bigger than her life.
Under the face of her nudity: a woman.
Her thoughts come and go, they begin each other, they end each other.
Under the face of her nudity:
She forgot, in order to remember.

3.
Your body: a violin,
The music of a blind violinist,
His hands give shape to the invisible.
The river of time in your skin,
The green coral in its depth remembers.
In your mouth, all the unsaid remains unsaid.
In your mouth: the symmetries of voice and silence,
The distances between word and meaning are far, they are too close.

***

4.
In the dark: the language of the touch. Touch is never silent.
You tell me yourself.
You tell me about the huge tree of the night,
About the leaves of noise falling inside you, always more.
Touch me.
You tell me about seeing that became mother: the world, crowded, empty,
About the inexplicable cross road that brought you here.
Touch me.
My beloved,
Your touch has more, much more than ten fingers,
And yet, to say:' I love' needs only two small fingers.
Touch me.

***

5.
The distances: a halo over the horizon.
Your closed eyes erase the distances,
Your closed eyes defeat the distances and are defeated .
The big noise of stone in the horizon
Defeats and is defeated by your silence.
Your love defeated and defeats itself.

***

6.
Woman,
In the circus of love
You are the acrobat on the tight rope, you fall from the height of danger.
You are the rubber woman, you lose yourself in disappearance.
You are the clown, the red tear, the red laughter painted on your face.
There is no shadow big enough to cover the tear, the laughter.
Woman, little clown,
You are no longer mistress of shadows, of the animal of pain behind the shadows.
Woman, little clown, find me.
In this circus of love, I am the tamer of shadows.
Find me.
I'll tame your shadows, I'll tame the animal in your shadows, the animal of pain.
I'll know how to love you, tamed, wild.
Find me.

7.
Your caress says so much in so little,
Ten tiny fingers are enough.
The madness in your touch is naked.
I love your nakedness, the magic of the visible.
I love your secret beauty, the invisible inside the visible
Like a dawn, a moment before it comes.
I love the seed of light in your thighs, a moment before it was sown.

***

8.
You gave shape to my passion,
It brought you words,
Like a sea inside the night, entwined.
Your words entwined in what you are, in who I am.
It brought the journey of your fingers,
The long fingers of star light,
Into my nocturnal body,
Into the dreams that undress me.
My beloved,
Undress, like a dream, who I am, what I love.

***

9.
When I remember, I destroy what I remembered before,
I remember something different, a new past.
My beloved,
You are the metamorphosis of time,
You are the past, you are my future, entwined.
You are the moment before dawn, before awakening,
Before the solar grass flowers.
My beloved,
Tell me what time it is in your time,
Tell me your name before it awakens.
My beloved,
You are the first wisper,
When things are so new that they don't have yet a name.
You are nameless.
Tell me what time it is in your whisper,
Tell me your name before it is born.

***

10.
Woman,
Your love is ancient, a distant spring when time was still new.
Your eyes: yellow red, like a gentle autumn,
The eyes that know how to love, that let leaves of tome fall, and still, love.
Your long fingers of star light from a dead star.
They begin in all your bodies: the body of the past, of the future, they caress all my bodies, the way love does.
Woman,
You love because there is no other way to live.
You love because you don't want to die.
Woman,
When you love, the distant spring is visible, naked.
When you love you are transparent , a gentle rain.

***

11.
You are too young, too easy to believe, to seduce.
Your beauty is new, too new to have a name.
Your fingers: a net.
Your fingers: blind butterflies in a net, a caress.
Young girl,
Who will guard your new beauty, who will guard you from your beauty,
Who will guard the net.
Young girl,
Who will guard you from love, the blind butterfly.

***

12.
My beloved,
We love the way we die,
From inside out.
And we don't know that love is a root,
Growing silent, wild,
From inside out.
My beloved,
We don't know the secret life of a root,
How it becomes all the things we don't know about love:
All the things we call love.
My beloved,
Only love can explain love.
Only life can explain life.
My beloved, there is a field out of explanations, out of words.
There, I'll wait for you.

13.
Woman,
You are so secret, so unknown.
Undress your words, your silence, your touch.
Woman,
We love each other alone in our body, in the shadows of disappearance.
Woman,
The shadows dissolve, and maybe dissolving is uniting.
Woman,
Your motions are a river of shadows.
Dissolve in me.

14.
Woman,
You sat by the sea,
The sand took the imprints of your motion.
The bottom of the sea blue green was still in your depth.
Woman,
You sat until there was no sea in your eyes,
You sat until there were no waves inside you.
All that was left was the imprints in the sand,
Like a passion, remembering, forgetting.

***

15.
My beloved
We are alone, each in his body,
And we are together, like a twilight,
The shadows mingled with light. A truce.
My beloved,
Each truce has a bridge,
It brings us close,
It measures the distances between us,
The small daily separations.
My beloved, in this world of separations,
Find me.

***

19.
Your face: pure water.
The water gives shape to your face:
A liquid mask, fragile, transparent.
Syllables rain over you,
Like the laughter of water,
Like the fluid labyrinth flowing beneath a laughter,
Like the inexplicable laughter of a clown.
My beloved,
Even a clown can't explain his laughter.
My beloved,
In a place beyond knowing, beyond words,
Laugh .
It rains in your laughter.

***

17.
With a single thought
I make you matter:
A body of a woman, the lips of the beginning of a smile.
With a single thought I change time,
I make you a child:
The eyes bigger than your face, bigger than your life.
Wait for me, beyond thought, beyond time.
Wait for me
In your body of a woman, in your lips of a smile, in your gaze of a child.
***

18.
You left.
I was abandoned by your gaze, the gaze that let me see myself.
Inside me I am blind.
I was abandoned by your touch, your touch that gave me shape,
That knew the way to tenderness. The longest journey.
Inside me, I am shapeless. Inside me I travel to the nowhere.
You molded yourself by what you remembered, by what you had to forget.
Woman,
No one can resist what he remembers, what he forgot.
You left,
Defeated by who you were, by what you couldn't forget.

***

19.
You are all the seasons of the day:
The red tear of dawn, the burning tear caresses all the colors of blood.
It's noon in your eyes, what you see is mother: the sun,
The shadows raining from the light.
And night, so little moon left, a sliver, a candle in the eyes of a child.
The night is a stone falling into your deep well, deeper than dreams.
Your night is thirsty,. The child is thirsty, and dreams are no longer water.

***

20.
At night, you are visible.
At night, in the middle of all the disappearances, I see.
I see your motions beneath your body, a choir of veins, breath, trembles.
At night I find you.
The day makes you less visible. The sun blinds your shape. I miss your shape.
My beloved,
Open the door of the night, I long for you.
Open the door of the night, I wait for you.
My beloved,
You are in my longing. You are my longing.
Come.

***

21.
My beloved,
The eye cannot see itself,
And the light cannot see itself,
But the eye can see the light,
And the light can see the eye,
Like a big truce. The biggest.
My beloved,
Love cannot see itself.

***

22.
Your face in the window is sad. There are shadows in the window.
I look for you, beyond looking, beyond seeing.
The lines that divine, so deep in my palm, follow you.
And I don't know what is real: what I see, the shadows in the window, the lines in my palm,
And what is a memory that didn't happen yet.

***

23.
The night:
The journey of silence,
Of a root into the deep recesses of your body,
Of a drop of dawn inside you: semen of light.
The night: a journey of joining.
In the middle of the joining, in the middle of the silence,
You cry like a woman, like a child that wasn't born yet.
Woman, the world didn't begin in a word, it began in a cry.

***

24.
Girl,
The habits of time shaped you,
Dreams that were not yours, shaped you,
And the danger of the journey from man to man, shaped you.
You sowed your love like ten empty fingers.
Girl,
You had to steal the reasons to live,
You stole in order to go on living.
Girl,
You stole because the absence stole all your reasons,
Each night from the beginning.

***

25.
You left.
You didn't know that you carried me along.
You didn't know how to leave yourself, who you are, what you feel, behind.
You didn't know how to travel light,
Without the dust of memories, the dust of forgetting.
Woman,
Deserts begin in dust. Dust is never light.

***

26.
Slowly, you are leaving.
Your night is always further,
Your night is always more secret, more private.
Your eyes closed out, open in,
What do you see, what do you remember.
Do you feel the southern winds in your lips,
The warm winds that breathed me.
Woman,
I didn't know that life is the art of losing,
That in order to find something, even yourself,
You have first to lose it,
And I don't know where I lost you,
I don't know where to find you.

***

27.
The last dream,
The last hands bring blood to our skin,
The madness of the body is put out, like a wild forest fire.
Our open palms, the fingers: burned leaves.
Woman,
I don't know how to capture time, how to make it stay.
The mist in our mouth, we breathe each other:
The last bridge.
The distances between us, always more,
The bridge measures how far, how more.

***

29.
You close your eyes
In order to see the distances of disappearance,
In order to bring me near as the night that wrapped us.
You close your eyes like pain,
Like the pain inside pleasure, the insane pain.
My beloved,
In the endless orbit of mirrors,
Everything repeats itself in order to be different, in order to continue.
My beloved,
I repeat myself inside you,
Patient as a mirror, wild as broken glass.

***

29.
My beloved,
Names know so little.
Life has no name, so it has all names.
Pain has no name, so it has all names.
Love has no name, so it has all names.
My beloved,
Choose any name, choose no names. Call me with no name.
I'll come.

***



SECOND NATURE

1.
You can accept life, strong as patience,
To accept what is unchangeable.
You can rebel against all the rest:
The hands sold in the market of flesh, the hunger sold in all the markets of the world.
You can clean your knees from the dust of kneeling,
To know what is holy:
The fatigue of work, the salt in your muscles,
The two bodies of love entwined.
You have to take back the hand that you sold,
You have to take back your life.

***

2.
In the room,
The night dreams from floor to ceiling.
In the room, the door.
Girl, you live and die on both sides of the door,
Both sides may be fatal.
Girl,
You live in the inexplicable space from here to door,
From wall to time.
You live in your inexplicable words, in your inexplicable motions,
And yet, they shape you, they shatter you,
Like the other side of the door,
Like the other side of time.
Girl, I wait for you.
I am on both sides of the door.

***

3.
Girl,
You don't know how to measure the balance of light,
Of the eyes closed in, closed out.
You don't know how to measure the balance of knowing,
Of not knowing that you don't know:
Who is the victim, who is the killer, who is innocent, and if innocence exists.
Girl,
You don't know where tears begin, in which eyes, in which pain.
You don't know how to measure pain.
Girl, pain measures you.

***

4.
You write words and you lose them,
They belong to no one, they belong to everyone.
You are alone,
Your gaze travels over the small plain in your palm, it has nowhere to go.
And you lose the people: a hand that gives you water.
The hand belongs to no one, it belongs to everyone. The hand is invisible, you don't see it.
You are thirsty,
The urge for living is thirsty,
The urge for loving is thirsty,
The hand that gives water is thirsty for you.

***

5.
You live blind, deaf, ready for nothing.
The world is a glacier, melting,
You drown in an invisible world.
You live, seeing, hearing.
Seeing, hearing may be pain,
They may empty the eyes, the ears, like a cry.
There are many kinds of slaves,
The slave of blindness, the slave of pain,
The slave of love, the slave of a dream,
And you don't know how to measure how free you are,
How many slaves sleep in your freedom.

***

6.
Inside you: dawn, the sound of a simple day,
The small river where you drink your eyes.
There are faces in the river, words, silences,
All you love, all that drowns you,
There is nothing simple in the river.
There is the flow of the rivers towards the sea,
The sea where the river loses its name,
The sea wherre the river drowns for the last time.
There is nothing simple in the sea..
And you forget you are the source of the simple day,
You forget how to be simple.
Simplicity is hard work. It tires you.

***

7.
At night, things lose their color:
The words, the silence, the motions.
At night, the drunkards gulp their cry. Pain is wine.
At night,
The slow death of the visible,
The fear of the body, of the invisible bones, feels like fatigue.
At night,
The breast within you: the tired milk:
Whatever you remember,
Whatever you cannot forget.
At night,
The bodies entwined are visible,
The flicker of death inside them,
The flicker that lets them live, love, write poems,
Is visible.

***

8.
In the room, the only nature are the walls,
The madness of walls in a stone.
Your shadow: prisoner of the walls.
Your shadow: prisoner of all your shapes.
And you: you don't recognize your shadows,
You don't know whose bar makes the prison- prison.
In your motions, small prisons:
The habits of life,
The habits of daily death.
In your motions: the fatigue of habits.
There are too many habits,
Too many for one little life.

***

Your body: coal. Your motions burn you.
Everything is an adventure, even the journey from one moment to the other,
So, everything is a risk. The laughter bites your teeth.
And everywhere, your hungers.
The real hunger devours the phantom bread.
The real hunger is a wild forest fire,
And yet, it cannot burn itself.

***

9.
The fear of seeing. Your eyes closed,
And yet, that's where tears begin.
Seeing, the artist of painting images.
We live, each one, between himself and the image.
We live, each one, between himself and the image of others,
And we never know whose is the indifference,
Who we love .

***

10.
Somewhere , almost invisible,
Beautiful as a rain drop, glistening water;
The cross road of love.
Maybe you measure the distances between love and the law of man,
Maybe, you choose the hell inside you, bones burning like sin,
A mouth burning like thirst.
Maybe you choose the bodies of love entwined. You believe they are holy.
I speak about what lives between the entwined bodies, the drop of dawn in their thighs.
Remember me when nature bleeds inside you, when it is thirsty.

***

11.
You love the danger of disappearance, flying, diving, in the middle of the plaza.
You don't know that you cannot play with luck,
Luck plays you, a wooden soldier in all the chess games of the world.
You begin each journey from the end,
You don't know there are no arrivals, no departures, no end to begin from.
You don't know you cannot play with time:
Break the moon in the water,
Break the roots of dawn.
You cannot play with the cosmic orbit of an hour.
The orbit will play you:
A dead star turning, turning.
The exquisite cemetery.

***

12.
You no longer use suspicion. Suspicion is pain.
The dream inside you knows no longer its equal.
It doesn't want the eternal knives:
Cut day from night, cut the white from the black.
It is a dream of twilight.
The fallen leaves of shadows mingle with delicate branches of light.
The dream is a journey, like all answers,
The dream is a truce,
The longest journey, and the answer continues, continues.

***

14.
In a corner of silence: the webs of suspicion, grey fingers of a spider.
The fly on the lamp: dead because of the longing for light.
On the skin of reality everything is far, everything is close:
The webs, the suspicion, the grey fingers, death, the longing for light.
On the skin of reality: anticipated memories :
The red tear of dawn that didn't begin yet,
The sun that must come: there is no free will in nature.

***

15.
The blind violist in the corner of the street.
The music digs holes in the shadows. It sees.
The music licks him, like an animal of pain.
That's where the tears begin.
The music is a dove. It is, like all answers, a journey .
It knows the way home. The longest journey,
And the blind violist is a journey to the skin of the invisible.
The exquisite skin.

***

16.
Woman,
Your indifference: a cemetery of feelings,
And yet, even you has to forget in order to live.
Woman,
What do you forget, how much, how deep.
Woman,
You are alone even when you are not,
You remember what cannot be forgotten,
You motions repeat themselves like a shattered clock inside you,
Like a journey from one empty moment to the other,
And I don't know where your tears begin, if they begin,
I don't know how much forgetting can a tear contain.

***

17.
Life continues like the age of cross roads,
Like the age of choices.
The fatigue of choice: a tremble in the finger that pointed,
The finger, like a leaf that fell for the last time.
The fatigue of choice: a journey. It goes far, much further than the fear of choosing.
Questions, answers are journey too,
And you don't know which journey arrives to what you want to choose,
You don't know that answers, questions have no departure, no arrival.

***,

18.
There are separations in everything,
Also in the silence.
It separates the motion towards someone from your hands,
It separates the whisper from your the lips.
It separates the knife beneath the wrinkles
From what your wrinkles know.
And in the silence somewhere inside, everything is a voice,
All the separations murmur.
Close your ears. Listen.

***

19.
Prisoners have bars in their eyes,
And bars over what they think.
The hunger to live is divided into three meals,
And the thirst of living is an aquarium, shut water,
The tear of a fish, like a forgotten fragment of an ocean, sees you.

***

20.

We are all pilgrims to happiness,
The journey of pure water in a gaze , in the motions of a hand that make, that touches.
The longest journey.
Little by little we learn the pain of a butterfly,
We learn that happiness is hard work. It knows what suffering is. It is exquisite.
My beloved,
There are no arrivals,
But spring is near.
My beloved, your pollen is beautiful,
Come close, your pollen in your lips.
My beloved,
Love is hard work, and the pollen is hard work.
My beloved,
There are no arrivals.

***

21.
They sell you youth, they sell you happiness,
But, silent man, your face, the shriveled face,
Sees the stars ripen,
The cosmic dimension of disappearance.
The fatigue is the only thing to lean on,
And the memories that didn't happen yet.
You tie your dream to the horizon,
Silent man,
The horizon is a journey without beginning, without end.
Silent man, Your face has something common, something strange, something innocent.
Your eyes, like the eyes of a child, bigger than your face, bigger than your life,
But the child is not enough.
The child is eternal the moment before it is born,
Then eternity ends, time begins.
Silent man,
Your face , the wandering time in your face, will follow you.

***



LIKE AN IMAGE

1.
Night made of memories.
The images that paint you real-unreal.
And the memory is another mother.
It bears images, and each image is a memory, remembering bears itself , it bears you.
After all, you don't recognize the things you lived, you loved, words, faces,
Until they become memory.

***

2.
At the bedside of the sick.
The fear in the sweat, the pain in the sweat.
The window: a rectangle in the wall,
Opens to another wall without dimensions.
In the evening,
The shadows measure the silences that were old before they began.
They count the dreams that died long before they ended.
And the eyes, the eyes that were once a child,
Are shadows too. They give shape to the invisible.
The cross in the hands is the only home. Slowly it crucifies the hands.

***

3.
Wars enter existence with water and blood.
The smell of sick water,
The taste of blood in a voice that used to be mother.
There are lines on the map,
You don't understand why so much fury, so much rage for a line.
There are flags on the map,
You don't understand why so much fury for a flag.
You don't know why you fight, with whom, against whom.
You don't know why a line on the map, a flag, are holy.
You don't know why death is a religion.

***

4.
Suburban houses, subdued storms.
The crossroad that separates the possible from the possible, inexplicable.
In the yards,
The moment of seeds ends a moment before it began.
The sadness of a man.
It makes you human.
Sadness is a wide prairie. You are free in your sadness.
Maybe your eyes are a severed tear, the pain of seeing,
But, you are free in your eyes.
Among the rocks of your night, the inexhaustible silence.
You are free in your silence.
Sad man,
Somewhere in a corner of your silence,
Seeds are visible, the breath of a seed without dimensions is visiblle.
Sad man,
The possible is visible,
And nothing to separate the possible from the possible.

***

5.
Doors, captives of the handle,
Captives of the hand in a handle.
Young man,
You are captive of the door,
Of the separation between the autumn in, the autumn out,
The leaves fall, like dust of a season.
Young man,
Life and death are separate, united,
Their hands open, like a cry, on both sides of the door.
Young man,
You live the way you die, on both sides of the door.

***

6.
The birds of prey are a cloud, a fragment of sky, and yet, they are heavy.
The magician in the talons
Makes death from life, makes dark from light, make desert from water.
The fingers of his hands,
Five guns in each hand,
Thousand deaths in each hand.
Death is bigger that what death remembers,
Death gasps for another last time.
Young man,
The five fingers may know the way to tenderness. The longest journey.
They may take back what was theirs:
The light, the water.
They are thirsty.
Thirst is a power. It is the magician of rivers.

***

7.
Young man,
Where to you keep your most alone.
Young man,
The animals of prey are alone in their hunger, alone in their claws,
Alone in the inexhaustible blood.
The cave, the sign of zero, is alone.
Young man,
The cubs are not alone,
The sobs are audible,
The river of milk in their mouth is not alone,
It is a mother.
Young man,
Whatever you do, you are mother of what you do,
Whatever you think, you are mother of what you think.
You are a river.

***

8.
I am at home in my home.
There are others at home in my home:
Sleepers, shoulder to shoulder, a bridge of warmth.
Sleepers, their dream, a sudden cry without 'why', with endless 'why's'.
On the skin of the dark,
Eyes closed out, open in.
What do they see, what do they remember.
On the skin of the dark,
Hands discover their body, like a child,
Hands invent the shape of others, like an artist, like love.
On the skin of the dark,
I learn what light is.

***

9.
The snow defeated by a flake: melting, melting.
Time defeated by small oblivions, daily.
In the plaza: the puddle of a child,
Inside it: a fallen sun, a paper boat,
The boat goes far, further than memory.
Dawn comes, a moment after the rooster's call,
When it is too late,
Too late to absolve the defeated, to absolve the defeating.
There is a cross inside each victory. It goes far, much further than memory.

***

10.
The hungry can eat only their hunger,
And the drunkards can drink only the hot sweat of the benches and their sleep.
The morning, transparent, translucent, everything is visible.
The carnivorous feathers of a vulture,
The colors that the songs of the birds invent,
The smoke in your sweat.
In the sea, the sky, the clarities:
All the dead drowning each day from the beginning.
Dying is not an arrival. It is a journey.

***

11.
Reflections: roots in the water.
The waves: the roots are shipwrecked,
They go deeper, always more.
Everything is the longing for roots.
The birds escape the huge tree of the night with songs of panic,
The wind shakes the night.
It is strange, but birds need roots too.
And somewhere in a corner: a caravan of bodies. The dead.
They look for the roots of death.
It is not easy to find the roots of death inside you,
To weep over the corpse of your childhood, the corpse of your life,
It is not easy to watch your dying, each day from the beginning.

***

12.
Everything is harvested from storms,
Everything has a storm inside it.
The world was harvested from the cosmic furore,
The infinite furore of chaos, void and dust.
The fruit is harvested from the tree of storm,
From the wild roots in a leaf.
And your face is harvested from the storm,
From the wars of seeds.
There are infinite seeds inside you: the seeds of a gaze, the seeds of what's free.
The wars of seeds are a big storm, the biggest.
And you, child of storm,
Where does the storm begin. Where do you begin.

***

13.
The passages where you travel to something: to what you are, to what you are not.
Passages where thoughts become matter: a landscape, a road.
Passages where the laughter becomes wine and a family of faces.
Passages in the night, where love becomes visible, where the deep recesses of a woman are Translucid.
Passages where the possible makes the possible visible, clear.

***

14.
You are as beautiful as the dream of the sea,
The dream of beginnings, the secret book of origins.
Your eyes: the eyes of a child, bigger than your face, bigger than your life.
The sea was a child's sea,
The child believes in its eyes, the child dreams its eyes.
It sees the dust, the dust is not sadness, it is the flower of rocks.
It senses the mysterious roots, they don't feel dark, they feel like an underground fruit.
It sees the orbit of seeds, turning, turning, like a clock.
The child doesn't know what time it is in the seeds, in the secret fruits,
What time it is in its time.

***

15.
Seasons never come alone,
They come in couples or even foursomes.
There is summer beneath the cold sun, dripping snow.
There is autumn in all the seasons,
Plants flower and wither at the same time, as if there was withering from the beginning
The tree of the night bathes in noon water: a sea of warmth, like a sea of fish in love.
And the birds migrate and arrive at the same time,
Their song is a feather, but they are a power, they are big, much bigger than what they are a power, their flight tears the air, their flight makes time vertical.
There is departure in each arrival.
And sadness never comes alone,
So, you don't know where tears begin.

***








KNOOWLEDGE FORBIDDEN

1.
We are in an orbit made of habit and of the unexpected.
At times, we wear our skin under our clothes,
At times, we wear it over our clothes. We are visible.
The daily repetition of everything makes us different,
Even when we are the same.
We are a child building his sand castle again and again,
In order to tame his hands,
In order to be king of his hands
In the exquisite sand castle.

***

2.
Young girl,
Everything is an adventure, even the journey from day to the other,
The danger of losing yourself.
You travel in places populated with eyes. The fear of seeing, the power to see.
You travel in places populated with cries, cries that could never leave the lips, that grew old in the mouths.
Young girl,
In this place,
The sun weeps shadows,
The absence weeps images.
In this place,
What you remember is yours, even love.
Young girl,
Remember, even when you forget.
Remember, even when memory is pain.

***

3.
Courage shrinks the shadows,
They are no more than half the world,
No more than half the night.
And the bullets magnify everything:
The cracked head, the holes that used to be eyes,
The hair: a mane, blind as an animal in pain.
Everything is enormous when a bullet finds your life,
Everything is final,
Like a tear that wasn't wept.

***

4.
Hope is dead, and the memories.
You erase time, the silent dictator. You are free.
You don't know if it is a miracle,
You don't know why you cry.
You don't realize that time continues,
And you have to go on without remembering, without hope,
Rootless as water, rootless as absence,
A little magician's helper
Who doesn't know how to halt the water of absence, pouring, pouring.
You don't know where tears begin.

***

5.
My words don't change me, they are shallow water.
Your words don't change me.
I am still. I am alone.
There is time in the absence. It changes it. It grows immense.
And my alone changes, like a gaze of time.. I travel from the alone to the alone,
And the alone is always bigger, it makes me more invisible:
A dead street lamp that used to be light, in the middle of a dead end.
I hold myself on the dead street lamp.
They stampede the invisible in all the streets of the world,
And I don't know who will guard the invisible,
Who will guard the alone in each invisible.
There are too many invisibles, and too few people.

***

6.
Memories remember me, windows see me.
Each day we invent death. There are cemeteries of absence,
There are shipwrecks with someone's face.
It's dawn.
Something invades the endless thirst, softly, like dew.
I count the dew, I count the thirst.
My beloved,
There is a drop of dew in your deep recesses., a single drop.
Mother of light, semen of life.
My beloved,
I hear your sigh in the fourth wall of loneliness, your sigh is an echo,
The heavy silence of the white.
In which echo, in which silence shall I find you.
My beloved,
We live at the edge of knowledge,
Like an animal of pain, like the gold fish of love.
My beloved,
In which edge shall I find you,
Unknown, unexplained, real.

***

7.
Young man,
There were locked doors in your eyes.
You broke the doors, you freed your eyes,
And yet, the locked doors are still there.
Young man,
Prison is not a locked door,
It is the thought of the key.
Young man,
You broke the door,
But you never forgot the key.
You liberated your eyes,
But there was nothing free in their freedom.
Young man,
Your thoughts think in your eyes,
You didn't break the thoughts.
The key thinks in your eyes.

***

8.
I am a scavenger, it is my faith.
I gather the present before it rots,
The crucified silences, the muzzled laughter.
I gather the boredom of what lasts,
And I don't know who is the jailor, the boredom or the lasting.
I gather the sadness of what doesn't last.
I don't know how everything bruises me.
I don't know if those who are not scavengers are bruised by living, by going on.
I am going with what I have, what I know, what I don't know, the bruises that know me,
On the shortest road to pain.
And I don't have the courage to cry.

***

9.
I don't know what the wind in your shadows said.
It was too close, it was too far, the way winds are.
I didn't recognize you in the windy shadows,
My lost, my found, my lost one.
Restrain your winds, tell me what time it is in your shadows,
Restrain time like love, like a dream.
Wait for me in your time.
I'll find you.

***


SELECTWE POEMS

SOUND JUSTICE
There are the laws of nature.
You cannot change even a comma in these law,
But you can change whole paragraphs in the laws of man.
You can change wood into fire, give shape to warmth,
You can give shape to a touch, to the longing in the deep recesses of a body.
You can draw the moon in the water, the water becoming light,
Light becomes water. You give these a shape.
You can love life ,
Enough to give shape to what you think, to what you long, to what you trust,
You can love life
Enough to give shape to love.

***

THE PHOENIX
I am the road of time.
I burn things, like time. Everything is a wild forest fire.
I burn, and the flame stays in time,
It gives shape to what continues.
It gives shape to all the seasons of the suns,
It gives shape to the flicker of death inside people,
The flicker that shapes them.

***

SIMPLE PICTURES OF TOMORROW
Everything is a motion, an equation.
We add man to man. This is humanity.
We add man to woman. This is love. This is a journey to the tomorrow.
We add sun to earth: the power to grow.
We add hands to the soil: the power to make miracles: a field of bread.
We add time to time:
We try to die each day less, we try to live each day more ,
The equation of tomorrow is simple,
Even though we know that nothing is simple, not even simplicity.

***

HADZHI DIMITAR
Heroes are not a legend.
The man lying here is human, with a will of stone.
He lies, his eyes closed out, open in.
What does he see, what does he remember.
He fought in the biggest war: the war of the bread.
Maybe he sees the bullet that found his life, that left his blood empty.
Maybe he has the courage to cry.
Maybe he sees his dreams alive: fields of people and bread without limits.
Maybe he is afraid to die, maybe he wants to kill death in order to live,
In order to see what continues ,
Maybe even the tomorrow is enough.

***

THE FACE OF PEACE
Let your eyes see the work of thought, the work of beauty.
Let your eyes see the work of the seasons of time, look how quiet they walk.
Let your eyes see the struggle for peace, the peace that is a struggle.
Let your eyes see how people discover themselves, how they are discovered.
Let your eye see what it bore: fear. The mother of fear.
To love is an act of faith.
To be tall is to know the depth from where height begins.
To be happy is to have guests in your happiness, to be among the guests.
And you should know that everything, the work of the thoughts, the work of seasons, the work of happiness, the work of peace,
Everything is hard work. It ages you. It makes you more eternal.

***

MARINE
This is how the world begins.
Twilight. Shadows fight shadows, shadows fight the light,
Shadows mingle with light, like a truce.
The world begins in truce.
This is how the world begins.
Your body draws the sea close, closer than a breath.
The world begins in the sea.
This is how the world begins.
Your body draws me into you, close, closer than a touch.
Your body lets the sea flow out of your body, your blue body, your drowning body.
The world begins in your body.

***

IN APRIL 1949 PARIS WAS STILL BURNING
The men: mud and motion.
There was nothing between the men and the city.
The men: ruins, deserted worlds.
There was nothing between the men and the city,
The old men, old ruins, the power to remember.
There was nothing between the old men and the city.
The children: the strange power to continue, the courage to cry.
There was nothing between the children and the city.
The city: all the dimension of a nature.
There was nothing between nature and the city:
The rhythm of day and night, the rhythm of the living and the dead,
The rhythm of pure breath.
There is no other city between us and the city.

***

AT SAINT ALBAN
The country side continues its habits.
The rivulet licks our toes,
The breeze licks our breath.
We'll have to leave,
But tonight, beneath the huge tree of the dark,
Everything feels quiet,
The roots of the tree, our roots, our bodies, how light our motions move, the motions that find us, that find the others.
And hope is an eye open out, open in. It makes the visible-visible, and deep inside , the eye open in, senses the invisible , the way one senses pain, longing, love.
And the eye open in remembers. Hope needs the past. The past is full of future.

***

THE KISS
Woman,
You drift towards me.
Your eyes closed out, open in.
What do you see, what do you remember.
I see your face,
Your eyes huge, beyond the limits of your eyes.
I see myself in your eyes,
There is no other way to long, to love.
Woman,
Wait for me in your gaze without limits,
Wait for me in what you remember.
I'll be there.

***

PRAYERS OF WIDOWS AND MOTHERS
We were a river, and we wanted to be the sea.
We didn't know that there are no seas, only one ocean.
We lived, our homes shoulder to shoulder,
Our lives shoulder to shoulder,
We understood so little,
We lived, we loved, natural as magic..
We didn't know how to kill death,
The death that killed us.
We had no weapon,
Except the urge to live:
A match, the biggest fire,
The smoke taller than the sky,
The smoke that protects the fire,
The fire that protects our life.

***

NO MORE ALONE

They came, beautiful like gazelles, into the night.
They were so pure, the smell of love was clear water,
The sang a song that came from very far, like a dream,
And everything was a journey to a distant shore:
The beauty, the love the gazelles, the dream.
They traveled, each one in his life, each one in the lives of the others,
The dreamed, each one in his dream, each one in the dream of the others.
Everything was a vast shore.

***

DIALOGUE
There are those who believe in love,
Who believe that the sun weeps shadows softly,
Who feel the tear of a fish at the bottom of the sea.
There are those who believe in life,
Who believe in the family tree,
Each leaf a face, each fruit a face,
Bound and alone.
There are those who cannot forget the wall of shooting,
The square dimensions of the infinite.
Each hole, a person,
Each person, a hole deep inside them.
There are those who cry for those who cried for them.
There are those who continue the journey to who they are, to who they want to be.
The journey without departure, without arrivals,
The journey that has a station inside them.
It's midnight, the 12th station,
A moment before dawn.

***

MOUNT GRANNOS
The mountain is harsh. It tames us.
It makes us hard stone.
The night is harsh, it tames us.
It makes us visible.
Shadows of men, men of hard shadows.
Death is harsh. We cannot kill death,
But the urge to live is a weapon.
We struggle in order to live, in order to love, in order to give the dreams their endless dimensions, our endless dimensions.
The struggle without beginning, without end.
It may kill us, but it cannot kill a dream, it cannot kill love.

***

LIKE MANY OTHERS
In war,
You grow old before you were young.
The blessing of bullets and hunger,
The deep void in hope, the huge absence in the visible.
In war
You meet also people, enemies of death,
People of simple words, the ones that let you live,
And you are not sure what is memory, what it dreams,
You don't know what you want to remember,
And what you remember because you cannot forget.
You don't know where the sadness ends, if it ends,
And you don't have the courage to cry.

***

PAUL VAILLANT
The sun in the next street may be the same,
And the one who turns the corner of the street
Has the face of someone you know.
The urge to speak to people, simple as the day,
To know nothing is really simple.
The urge to be close. To know closeness is not simple.
Paul,
Some turn the corner of the street and don't return.
Paul,
You were lost in my street, in a corner that remembers me,
I know where to find you.

***

IN SPAIN
There is no tree of freedom,
Trees are, like everything else,
Free and bound at the same time.
Yet, there is the family tree:
The family of people, of gazes, of pain.
Their leaves give us the sun, the sun free and bound in a leaf.
Their leaves give us the courage to fall,
The power to return in another season,
Bound to the tree, to the sun, to earth.
Free.

***

THE BROKEN MIRROR
In the shards: an oblique world,
The sea falls into your hand,
The sea drowns in your palm.

***

ANGUISH AND ANXIETY
The anguish to purify. The anxious thirst.
How can you purify yourself in thirsty water,
How easily you drown in thirsty water, so visible, so quiet.

***

THE CORNER
You turn the corner of the street
And you return after years, ages,
Like a journey around the world, around a flower,
Around the moon in the water, around your face in the water.
And there is no one to give you back what you didn't lose.

***

ABSENCE
You lie by me. In the dark, I see you.
My voice discovers you,
My fingers invent you.
I discover the memory of a journey in which I wasn't,
Songs when I wasn't.
I see you.
Your skin: the geography of memory. Your skin: looted cities.
Your skin: the pattern of quiet fields.
The sky falls in the fields, piece by piece, like rain.
I see you.
In the dark, your body in my body:
A journey I remember, and that remembers me.
I see you.

***

COURAGE
Paris: the beggar's clothes, sleeping under the bridges,
A city clochard:
The wisdom of how to stay alive,
Of how to be hungry and stay beautiful,
Of how to be cold, and stay melting.
My city,
Time flows in everything, in the defeated, in the defeating.
My city,
You'll have to be unconquered even when conquered.
You'll have to find the power inside a defeat,
You'll have to defeat the defeat in your ruins, in your scarred river,
In order to defeat your defeater.
My city,
You'll have to live for those who died for you, for those who live for you.
You'll have to cry for those who cried for you.

***

RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF AUGUST
Right in the middle of summer
Paris spits its sweat.
Here at night, we loved and we killed.
Since the darkness was understood
Will there be light tomorrow.
Since the hopelessness was understood,
Will there be hope tomorrow.
Since death wasn't understood,
Will there be life tomorrow.
Since the courage was not understood,
Shall we have the courage to weep,
Shall we have the courage to ask someone, someone just passing by:
Help me weep.

***

GABRIEL PERI
A man died.
His hands, the ten fingers of warmth, naked,
They were not enough.
The bullet found his life, his warmth.
There is no manual for living,
But there are words that bring life closer.
The word 'mother', the word 'child' the toy of life,
The word 'friend', the word 'love',
And the word: the men who died because warmth wasn't enough,
The word 'sadness', the digger of depth, digging beneath the warmth.

***

WOMAN IN LOVE
My beloved,
I want you to be a journey.
Answers are a journey, and love,
Arrival after arrival,
And I want you to be the journey of the night,
The journey of the moon in the deep recesses of your body,
Body after body, depth after depth, arrival after arrival.
My beloved,
I want you to be close,
Be the skin of my eyesight,
Be the skin of my silence,
And I want you to be a journey.

***

BEING
My beloved,
We bear each other, we are the seed and the womb.
Your fingers, the long fingers of star light
Were born in deep dark sky.
I see you.
My beloved,
Long corridors, nameless doors,
The red traffic light at each edge
Bear the dead ends in rivers,
The shadows of loneliness in rivers, the dry rivers in loneliness.
I see you.
My beloved,
Come close. I am thirsty.
I am thirsty like longing, like the dry rivers.
Let's drink each other's thirst,
The pure water.
I see you.

***

ON A NEW NIGHT
Woman,
You repeat the color of your gaze, your silence, your motions of loving.
You are always the same in a different way.
Woman,
The skin of your nakedness: the skin of Eros.
Beneath the skin you are even more naked.
Woman,
There are nights on your skin,
There are the ten fingers of desire.
What does your skin see, what does it remember.
Woman,
Your nakedness doesn't want to be undressed,
Your skin of Eros is always different.
No one can cross the same night twice.
Woman,
I'll dress you in pure water: the moon in a river, naked.

***

EPITAPH FOR A SPANISH PEASANT
I didn't want to fight
Because I didn't want to die,
I didn't want to die in a war of others,
So much fury for a line on a map, so much rage.
The only thing worth dying for is life, the war of the bread,
But the bullet found my life, the bullet, studied as a crime.
I died on a line of the map.
They said it was the last war,
But I knew that there is no last war,
That each war is the first war ever.

***

NOVEMBER 36
There are builders of homes, they build life a home.
There are builders of ruins.
In the ruins: bones, walls, books, the eyes of a child.
One day, they'll remain alone in the destruction:
The floods in the ruins,, the wild fires in the ruins.
No one will be left,
But there will be always a last question.
It is sad
That we can get used to everything,
Even to the mine field beneath the feet of a question.
It is sad,
That we continue the questions, alone, on the mine field.
No one can kill a question.
They pray to the sky,
They don't know that the sky is empty.
They pray for victory,
They don't know that victory is earth.
They don't know that the only war to die for
Is the war of the bread,
That hunger is a serial killer.
There are seas: a drop of rain on the window. The sum of all tears.
There are cities:
The sum of all pain.
Pain is a power, the whole rain in a rain drop,
There are no legends , no heroes, simply the rain.
Young man,
Remember the past,
The family of people around a fire, a cave.
Remember the journey to human,
The map bleeding like the cut throat of a child.
Young man,
You should invent a new map, you should invent yourself, like time, like life,
Each day from the beginning.

***

THE VICTORY OF GUERNICA
WOMEN AND CHILDREN IN GUERNICA
The women had to invent what didn't exist: the milk, the seed, the flour : the dream of bread
There were women whose fear nursed hope: the beloved child.
Women and children had the same red lines on the palm,
Fate stared at the blood.
Children don't know that an embrace is a journey, but they didn't ask.,
They didn't know yet that death is easy and difficult,
That dreaming was easy and difficult.
They didn't know that what stares at them was the void in the eyes of a god.
They were afraid without knowing why.
They were brave without knowing why, natural as magic.
They didn't know they were the last train to the future,
The fire, the smoke, the shouts made the train more real.

***

SISTERS OF HOPE
Women: farmers.
The seed in their hands: tender. The seed in their hands: power.
And women: soldiers.
The battle against the word 'hunger', against the word 'war'.
Women: soldiers of the seed, farmer of the seed.
Women: soldiers of life, farmers of life.
Women: farmers of tenderness.
In the hand of a woman,
The possible and life were the same thing.
Soldiers and farmers were the same thing.

***

DESIRE
Desire is so ancient. It is in our genes, like the thirst:
The thirst to love, the thirst to continue.
There are deep nights when desire plunges its hand, tumultuous, vibrant,
Into the secret recesses of the body
To find
The white drops of moon:
Semen of life, milk of life.

***

THE LAST NIGHT
Nature is pure, but you are not.
You steal from the room the window and the sky in the window.
You steal from people their time. There is so little time left in their time.
Their crossed hands. You crucify them like a sinner, like a saint.
You don't know that the humble remember how to long, how to hope, how to love.
I hear them telling me old dreams, as old as the journey from the past.
I hear them calculating the dimensions of light with the five fingers of longing.
I hear them adding time to time, time to hope,
I hear them adding time to the future, like a memory that didn't happen yet.
You don't know how big can an addition be,
You don't know that the future happens again and again, each moment from the beginning
In each addition.
You don't know that defeat is power,
That the defeated will defeat you,
You'll have to give back their life, their priceless life.
You cannot put a price tag on the priceless.
You don't know how bankrupt you are.
Your money is paper. The map of your markets is paper.

***

LIBERTY
My beloved,
I create a dream, and it creates me.
My beloved,
We create each other at our door, by the daily things.
I create again the echo of my childhood on a picture of a rock,
I create again the cry of the vulture, the carnivorous feathers free between air and air.
I create on the planes of the horizon, I invent the shape of the infinite.
My beloved,
In the cross roads, in the fatigue of sweat,
On the ten fingers of pain.
We create each other.
My beloved,
The small infinites of the possible, the freedom to invent, to dream, to love,
Creates us.

***

ATHENA
Greek people,
You never lost the worship of freedom:
The gods that came from far.
Greek people,
The true war left is the war of the bread.
You fight for the brotherhood of bread.
Greek people,
Hunger is an animal of prey, toothless, it devours you, it devours your life,
Each day from the beginning.
Greek people,
You have to take back your life.
Greek people,
The liberty of the bread, is human, is priceless.
No one can put a price tag on the priceless.

***

THE SAME DAY FOR ALL
You were in all the dimensions around me,
You were you,
And you were a thousand women around me.
The secret skin of your body, a shield against the desert,
The desert that kills the naked eyes, the naked thirst.
Guard me. I am naked. I am thirsty.
Somewhere I heard people singing.
They sang their pain, they sang what has not yet began.
I heard.
I knew that the song sang our journey.
It was the 12th station , it was midnight, a moment before dawn
The journey without arrival,
Arriving in a song.

***

FIVE SHORT POEMS
1.
In the air,
Two parallel winds
Fly into each other,
Feathers fall, parallel to each other,
Flocks of feathers, always more close.
2.
People speak,
They don't listen.
They perfect the art of talking.
3.
There are cars:
A new kind of a cross.
They crucify people, innocent, guilty,
On the metal cross.
The date of resurrection: unknown.
4.
Each morning
I walk, like a tree, towards the sun.
The fire in the rays burn in the fuel of shadows.
5.
Feathers make everything seem light,
Birds die like smoke.

***

LIGHT
The fly, the limbs of wire,
Shining, motionless, dead on the skin of a lamp.
The longing for light
Leads to the nothingness.
It is here that tears begin.

***

WORKER
You work. You make what life needs.
The needs of life come before anything else: the home, the food.
But nature is everywhere,
And you don't know who will guard the tree, the woods,
Who will guard the gazelle, the lamb,
Who will guard the hunter, the farmer in your genes,
You don't know who will guard the drop of dawn
In the deep recesses of your body,
Mother of life, semen of light,
Who will guard love.

***

THE NAKEDNESS OF TRUTH
Woman,
Longing is human,
It has no body, but it is alive,
It has no fingers,
But the touch says so much in so little.
Its thighs are innocent, pure water,
And yet, it is thirsty.
Woman,
You can be only as immense as your longing,
As immense as your thirst.

***

THE ARM OF SORROW
1.
You died like someone who has no father,
You died like someone who has a thousand fathers.
Each one, a ruined city in his eyes,
Each one, the silent embrace of a father in his arms.
We were close, father and son.
I sang in your songs,
I dreamed in your dreams,
I truth in your truth.
My friend, my son, they killed you,
But no one can kill a truth.

2.
Woman,
I dreamed for myself,
And I dreamed for you.
I lived more for myself,
I lived more for you.
But the night comes, too abrupt,
With mine fields in its feet,
With mine fields in its silence.
Woman, escape.
The night is too lonely
Your fingers: the fingers of star light
Are not enough for hope,
Are too alone to love.

3.
Child,
You are free in your silence,
But words betray you.
You have to choose: to confess your truth or not to confess.
Child,
It's war. You have to choose if to live or not to live,
To bleed until there is no life left in your life.
Child of war, child of cemeteries, child of love.

4.
My thoughts become matter:
Your shoulders, white feathers,
My thoughts: an arm around you,
My thoughts become my eye sight:
Mother of love, mother of sadness.

5.
We fight, each one alone in his body,
Each one in the battle of others.
The peasants: the earth in their teeth.
The workers: the ten fingers of hunger in their mouth.
They give shape to bread,
They give shape to a dream,
They give shape to the courage to love.

6.
Men leave the places where the world died, burning.
The places that could be innocent, the innocent are gone,
And the places return to them, like the taste of smoke.
They don't mind where they go,
The can be hungry everywhere.

7.
Men give shape to the struggle,
And the struggle shapes them.
They give shape to the light, to the shadows,
And they shape them.
And they give shape to dawn,
Dawn, the truce of shadows and light.
The truce is for everybody.

I wanted to see much with only two eyes.
I wanted to say much in little,
To be close, so close to my silence.
I was free in my silence.

***

SEVEN POEMS OF LOVE AND WAR

1.
Your eyes were a child
The magician of dreams.
Your eyes were a mother,
Tears were milk in your gaze. Your eyes waited for us
Like a child, like a mother, like love, like magic, like a dream.
Your eyes saw us.

2.
Your eyes, conquerors of time:
They remember.
Your eyes, magicians of dimensions, they see far,
The horizon: an open city.
Your eyes: a twilight.
Shadows mingle with light,
Your eyes: a truce with time.
You accept the seasons, and they accept you,
Your pink gaze of fruit.

3.
Words leave us apart,
The silence joins us.
Woman,
The nights with you are words, words,
A lonely struggle.
Woman,
We are, each one, alone in his words,
Alone in his night.
We are, each one, alone in the longing for love.

4.
Woman,
The nights are hollow,
Even the solitude is a shell.
Woman,
There is the face of a child in the window.
The child: a journey to the tomorrow,
The child is tomorrow.
Woman,
I don't find the child in your smile,
The child that bore you,
I don't find the window.
You try to measure pain,
You try to find the dimensions of a child,
Of the shadows in a corner of his silence,
Maybe everything is a number,
But there are not numbers enough
To count the face of the child in the window.

5.
Our truth is not bigger than us,
It is the size of a human.
Yet, even when they kill us,
No one can kill a truth.
We loved life, always,
And when you know how to love,
You love also the others, you find them in your love.
I say: I live, you live, we live.
I say: our lives, shoulder to shoulder.
I say: our homes, shoulder to shoulder.
Nothing shields us except the closeness:
The skin-less gaze, the skin-less silence.

6.
We didn't know how huge could the ugly be.
We didn't know how huge can bras be, a jail,
A country, a continent.
We didn't know how huge can a word be,
A word that searches the skin of the silence.
We didn't know how huge is the courage to cry.
We cry for the ugliness, for the bars,
We cry for those who cried for us.
We give the rain its immense shoulders.

7.
In the name of a gaze that saw me,
In the name of a hand that knew me,,
In the name of the children in the barbed train,
Their tiny shoes will be the only survivor of the fire,
Their tiny shoes will remember.
In the name of those who died the way they lived:
With bars in their eyes. With death in their eyes.
In the name of all those
We need the courage to cry.
Look how quiet the cry flows, like a slow river that didn't leave our mouth for years, for ages.
We have to learn how to cry.
In the name of all those,
We have to learn how to love, from the beginning.

***