I BELIEVE

The manifesto of a tear

Raquel Angel-Nagler

I believe in the old strangers with the old eyes
That I don't know from where they came.
Those whose only mother tongue is their life,
Whose only home left is the gaze.
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I believe in friendship.
A mouth to shares our silences.
A hand that gives us water.
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I believe in the journey to Ithaca.
I believe in the journey to dream.
The only home we'll ever have.
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I don't believe in mirrors.
I don't know if we can break them
But for sure, they can break us.
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I believe in those
Who have the courage to live
Naked as the rain, without an umbrella.
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I believe in those
Who have the home within them.
That's why they are at home everywhere,
That's why life is at home in their home.
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I don't believe in the Muses.
It is my pain that knows me,
That gives me my cry.
My words cry even when they don't know it.
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The only Muse I believe in
Is the flicker of death within us.
It gives us the most beautiful poems:
The poetry of twilight: the shadows of light,
The poetry of autumn : a silent leaf on our bed.
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I believe in tears.
They know the eye that wept them.
They know the pain of seeing.
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I believe in lullabays:
They are the oldest song that exists,
And they will exist as long as nights exist.
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I believe in myself.
I believe in the home that I am,
The roof over my silence.
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I believe in mothers:
The courage to be the silent milk of a child.
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I believe in mothers
When they remember
The child in their tears.
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I believe in the courage of snakes
To live to die crawling
With earth in their mouth.
The poisoned earth.
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I believe in the tear of a fish
That gives us the sea.
The ocean.
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I believe in those who look at the sea
For so long
Until it becomes their eyes.
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I believe in the beauty of the world:
In the moon hanging in the window.
In a leaf made of sun.
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I don't believe in happiness.
It was never a home
For my little deaths.
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I believe in the courage of a child to grow,
To become less eternal.
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I believe in the child
Who is the father of a man.
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I don't believe in the faithfulness of our childhood.
The child that I was is far away
Even his paper-boat
Is in another sea. Another ocean.
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I believe in the courage of the old
To weep tears
So frail. So final.
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I believe in home.
Whatever it might mean.
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I believe in silence:
Its courage, its fears, its crosses.
Maybe we are silent even when we don't know it.
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I don't believe in words.
They don't have the hundred mouths
Of a tear.
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I believe in solitudes.
The loneliness of living alone in our body,
Of loving alone in our body.
The loneliness of seeing, alone in our eyes.
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I believe in the courage to be afraid.
To touch the abyss with the first fingers, of clay.
The only fingers we have.
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I believe in the courage to sleep.
To lose ourselves in dreams:
Our secret tears.
To lose ourselves in the eye that wept them.
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I believe in the power of a touch
To give our body its secret fingers,
To give the fingers our secret body.
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I believe in the eyes of those who know
That tears are eternal.
That we inherit them from the far past,
That we'll bequest them to all the futures that exist.
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I believe in those
Whose only religion is life.
The only prayer.
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I believe in believing:
To believe that we exist, that we have the right to exist.
To believe when it rains over our lives, in an umbrella of mercy.
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I believe in those who lose themselves
Far from their life,
And don't know if they want to return,
And if returns really exists.
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So few of our fingers touch the fingers of others,
So few hands.
I believe in the courage of the fingers.
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I believe in the fear to die.
I believe in the fear to live.
Our holy tremble.
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I believe in the shore:
A home of waves.
Our lives.
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I believe in those who laugh
With all the mouths they have,
Who cry with all their tears.
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I believe in the courage of a bird
To live, to love, to die
Flying.
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I believe in the courage to die,
At least once,
In order to live, really live.
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I believe in the courage to voyage.
To travel from the alone to the alone
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I believe in beds.
The Paradise of our body:
Our sinner. Our saint.
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I believe in tenderness.
A nest of feathers.
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I don't believe in memories.
They have memories of their own,
And they like to imagine things.
We never know who we are, and whose child we are.
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I believe in the courage to learn
Between death and death,
How to be eternal.
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I don't believe in small lives.
I don't believe in small deaths.
I don't believe in small eternities.
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I believe in the child that holds my hand,
For years, for ages,
So that I wouldn't be lost alone.
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I believe in the courage to be fragile.
To break body by body. Alone.
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I believe in the eyes of those who surrender,
Who lose the home that they had,
But not the home that they are.
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I believe in the courage of a cry
That never left our mouth.
The courage to be silence.
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I believe in the courage of the body
To become pain.
To weep flesh in its tears.
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I believe in the corners of silence.
The place where we write letters to ourselves,
And at times, a letter to God.
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I believe in the courage of cats
To be so brave, so afraid.
The courage the gather the whole night in their eyes
In order to see.
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I believe in the courage of waiting.
To wait for ourselves,
To wait for our train.
To know waiting is life.
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I believe in those who have the sea within them.
In those who learn how to breathe water.
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I believe in the piece of sky that is my own.
In the bird with the cold wings: our life.
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I don't believe in silent gods.
Truth has to know also how to cry.
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I believe in the courage of a cry
To cry its silence,
Naked as pain.
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I believe in magic:
The moon in the sea.
The sea in the moon.
I believe we all need magic, like a child,
In order to live.
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I believe in the courage of an eye to see,
The courage to become a tear.
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I believe in the eyes of those
Who travel to the nowhere of their life.
Day after day. Hour after hour
In order to live.
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I believe in stars.
They are the voyage to the nowhere,
That's why they are so beautiful.
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I believe in the courage of ghosts
To live forever
In lives that are not their own,
In a cry that never left their mouth.
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I believe in those who open a door,
Because it was there.
Because doors are a journey.
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I believe in the courage of those who open a door
In order to see its other face, the closed one.
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I believe in the smile.
The quiet sun on the lips
That makes us beautiful.
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I am a moon-believer.
I love the hours when light is mysterious
When it makes us mysterious, and we forget who we are.
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I believe in the courage of clowns
To cry like a child
And to know why.
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I believe in the eyes of those who live dying.
Whose bed is by the window that looks into the night
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I believe in the courage of leaves
Who die with all the suns in their body,
With the summer still alive in their rustle.
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I believe in those who return.
Those whose hands are clenched
Because they hold the whole journey
And they don't want to lose it.
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I believe in the sun.
I believe in the poem that says so many things with one word:
Light.
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I believe in the eyes of those
Who gather all the twilight in a gaze.
The moment of truce.
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I believe in those
Who run up to the end of the world,
Up to the end of themselves,
Their daily Marathon.
In order to live.
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I believe in those who hold a leaf.
In those who find the tree within it.
I believe that often big things hide behind small things.
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I believe in the sea.
The blue abyss,
Where we lose our eyes.
Where we find them.
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I believe that at times, the past is mercy.
I believe in the years, the ages that sleep in my sheets,
So that I wouldn't die alone.
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I believe in the courage of the eyes not to see.
To protect us from the death of a tear.
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I believe in mine-fields:
Our past, our life, the street of time where we walk each day.
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I believe in life.
My home. My exile.
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I believe in those who turn the corner of a street
And never return the same.
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I believe in those who travel
And don't know if they want to arrive,
Or maybe they know that we never arrive.
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I believe in magic:
The sun in the water,
The liquid fire.
Maybe that's why we write poems.
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I believe in fate, sometimes.
Especially in the cross-roads.
Fate loves cross-roads.
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I believe in small freedoms:
The ones that let us own our eyes,
That let us own what we see.
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I believe in belonging:
Living a life that is home,
That is a mother, that is a child.
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I don't believe in forgetting.
Everything is forever,
Even the moment when an eye becomes a tear.
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Some evenings
I close my eyes in order to forgive.
But I am not sure if I really believe in forgiving.
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I believe in the eyes of those who drown alone
In their private rain.
I believe in an umbrella of mercy.
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I believe in broken clocks
Where time dies. Forever.
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I believe in empty rooms
Where at times I find myself,
Where I find why I was always silent.
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I believe in those who cross the night
And don't come out the same.
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I believe in the bird
That flies out of the sky
Alone in its wings.
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I believe in the courage
To die so many times
In order to live.
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I believe in the hand
That gave me water.
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I believe in the paper-boat of a child.
It took me always far,
And I never knew why I returned.
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I believe in the small days
I believe in the Jordan in their back yard,
I believe that they know the way to the sea.
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I believe in everyday things
Because I am also an everyday person and maybe we all are.
After all, time rolls in all the times , in our time, in the time of things.
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I believe in giants:
The death of tear.
Tears die like a sea.
Like an ocean.
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I believe in giants, sometimes.
After all, even Gulliver becomes small.
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I believe in the courage of the body
To become a tear
When there are no eyes left.
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I believe in bridges.
I believe in the eyes of those
Who measure the distances between us.
Between solitude and solitude.
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I believe in the touch.
In the things we make our own
With our fingers.
That we make them beautiful
Because we hold them, because we use them.
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I believe in the eyes of those
Who live like a sea, like an ocean.
In the eyes of those who find there the shipwrecks of their life.
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I believe in habits.
In the habits of the sun,
In the habits of the moon,
In the habit of living that makes us more eternal.
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I grew old.
I believe in the eyes
That have nothing to hope for,
And yet, they find hope everywhere.
That's why poems still exist.
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I believe in the rebellion
Of a falling rain-drop.
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I believe
That rivers are a journey,
Not home.
Like my life
Like my poems.
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I believe in the small steps of small people
Who live slowly, who love slowly,
Who have time enough for eternity.
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I believe in facts, even when they are unbelievable.
I believe in the minute things,
Too minute to have a name,
That make the world-world.
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I believe in temporary miracles.
My childhood, my life, a painless night.
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To learn how to believe.
To believe that the rain of the world is raining into our life.
To know why our eyes are wet, why our life is wet,
Even though we were home.
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I believe in people who hold the toys of life in their hand
And remember how to play.
Life plays all the time.
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I believe in feeling.
To feel what we feel.
To feel, like a magician, the aura of the hours, the aura of people.
After all, that's why we still write poems.
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I believe in roots.
We are not a tree, but we need roots.
When I travel, I always take a piece of root in my pocket
In order to dream.
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I believe in the tremble of a candle
With all the night in its body.
Fire is lonely.
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I don't believe in hidden power.
Power is in our eyes, in our gaze, in our smile,
At times even in our tears, it hardens them.
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I don't believe in memories.
They have memories of their own.
They give us another child in our tears,
They give us another man
Who whispers his name at night.
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I believe in the courage of those
Who lose themselves on the train tracks,
Who wait no longer for themselves
In the deserted station.
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I believe in the lives of those
Who long for the unknown, for a dream.
There are dreams that we are ready to live for, to die for.
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Because of madness of our little days
We live all like a madman.
We live alone.
We shout alone, even when we are silent, and no one notices.
We die, and we don't know how alone we were.
I believe that madness is truth.
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