LOVES AND DEATHS OF THE GOOD SOLDIER SCHVEIK

Remembering Tasos Livaditis

Raquel Angel-Nagler

We are young, and we saw our first dead,
And they were many,
Because wars are a Goliath without a David,
And they were young,
Maybe the wars love the young because they are innocent.
There were heads, and hands, and legs, and they were separated,
Maybe they missed each other, but it was too late.
And they were barefoot, so they got into our shoes,
And when we walk, we feel how they die there again and again.
When we'll die, they'll have to bury us with the shoes,
In order to let them die forever.
***
Wars don't end, even when they end.
They leave mine-fields inside us,
They leave mine-fields in the winds of the world.
Nothing is safe anymore,
Not even breathing the air in the morning,
And for sure thinking is dangerous. Thoughts step on mines all the time.
***
Some nights we hear something knocking on our door.
We don't know who could it be, since there is a curfew of fear.
We don't know it is our dead, and we don't understand how they could knock,
Since they are already here, in each room, in each silence.
***
We don't fight alone, but the bullet finds us alone.
We don't have time to finish an unfinished dream,
And maybe dreams never really finish,
We don't have time to finish our unfinished fate,
Even though it already finished.
***
We are not serial killers
But the taboo of all taboos 'don't kill'
Was killed,
And it kills us each night more.
We are dead and we know it.
***
We don't know when the people went, and where they went.
We don't know why they took the light in the window with them,
And why the neighbor dips her face, like an animal, to smell the clothes of her man.
We don't know why we cannot cry.
***
Wars are a cold place, even when everything is burning,
And the cold goes further than what we know.
Closing the window doesn't save us,
Maybe we close it too late, when the cold was already here, in our soul,
And it is not easy to close the soul,
Although they say that some people could do it.
***
Maybe when life is shot at one wall,
It is shot at all the walls of the world,
At the same moment, at the same night.
Maybe they cannot shoot the dreams,
Maybe some dreams go further, much further than the wall.
***
Nights full of curfews.
We are home, or at least, in what remained of our home.
We want to speak, but we are silent.
It is not easy to speak when we are condemned to death,
Of course we are always condemned to death,
But our death used to have a name, a face.
Bullets are anonymous.
***
Maybe what we hear in the street of the small hours,
As if they were hours from the past,
Are the steps of people who are already condemned to death,
And they may not even be on time for the last supper.
***
There are too many dead, where can they go,
Even the after-life, if there is an after-life, should be full.
There will be bodies everywhere.
I don't know if wars end when there is no one left to die,
I don't know if wars can continue between the dead and the dead,
When all that will remain in the world will be the rain and the silence.
***
Wars happen deep, very deep.
We are witnesses of the abyss .
We are the witnesses of the stones that roll down each day.
We never knew that wars happen so deep inside us.
We never knew that stones can cry.
***
The ones who are only half dead run away.
They take with them what's left.
A piece of bread, the picture of a child,
A dream that is not a child anymore.
They take the picture of the child in order to remember the child.
They take the dream in order to remember themselves.
***
Some don't leave the deserted town.
They don't know where they'll stay, why they stay.
Maybe they wait for a door to open, where there is no longer a door,
Maybe they wait for someone who survived,
Maybe they want the last survivor to know
That they waited.
***
It needs courage to surrender
Without surrendering ourselves.
It needs courage to see your dreams
When there are no eyes left.
When all that remains is one huge wound.
***
When you shoot someone at the wall,
You shoot all the walls of the world.
Walls keep the shot eternities of those who were shot,
They go further, much further than tears.
***
We dig with our eyes the earth.
We want to be buried, like an Egyptian king
With all that we saw, our only treasure.
With our dreams, with the walls where we were shot,
With a picture of our childhood that we held when they shot us.
***
There are barbed wires even in the sky.
God is free of course, the God of war.
Maybe mercy is behind the barbed wires.
***
We want to remember, because remembering is pain,
And pain means that we exist.
We don't know that war goes further, much further than pain,
That sometimes we don't know if we exist.
***
The tents, the nomads of war, and the hours nomads in our life.
Each evening, the lamp put out our day.
It was little,
But it was the only sun left.
***
Wars can make us big or small. We have to choose.
But once we choose to be big, we have no choice.
We have to die, and maybe to live
At the height of Man.
***
We fold the old clothes of those who died.
After all we have to send something to his woman,
At least the smell that loved her.
***
Each night there are too many dead and too few words.
That's why we don't speak.
At times someone coughs,
As if it were the only sound he would allow himself. A cry.
***
We look at the traces that the dead left.
We don't know that some traces don't die with the dead,
The way some dreams don't die when we die,
Because some things don't die easily,
Because some things are more stubborn than a bullet.
***
The tent, the nomad of wars, life, nomad in our life.
We were together and alone, because there is no other way to be.
When we were hungry, we shared our silence.
When we were about to die, we shared our life.
***
We feel that someone is dying because of the way he looks at us,
Because of what his eyes ask from us,
And we know we'll never betray this gaze,
Even when death will betray us.
***
Maybe somewhere else the seasons change,
But here it is always autumn.
We breathe the mud and it kills us,
But anyway, our graves are always within us,
Because also death begins always within us,
Even when the bullet comes from far.
***
We don't know how it happens,
But sometimes we see in the eyes of the dying
The eyes of someone beloved.
Maybe the eyes of the dying make us see better, love better.
Maybe they want to comfort us, because they know we need it.
***
Maybe when we are too tired, too hungry,
Our feelings feel for us.
We find our beloved in a hand that hold our hand,
In the warm sleep of someone near us.
Maybe what brings us far, brings us also close.
***
Maybe we are not utterly lost
When we find ourselves, at least in something.
In the silence, in the rain, in night we didn't know how to cross.
In the eyes of someone dying, the moment they saw us.
***
We wear on our neck the chain of someone who died.
It is not superstition, it is love.
Because there are wars where we have to choose.
To love the dream, to love the dreamer, or to love nothing.
***
Some nights, when it is too cold to live,
We embrace, the way men do.
We don't know it,
But we embrace also those who will never embrace.
***
We were poor, but there was love.
We forgot how it rained over our nights,
We forgot the holes in the floor, we thought something may send roots there,
Maybe a cherry tree, like a Japanese dream.
We didn't know if the cherry trees in Hiroshima dreamed.
***
Wars proved to me that there is a soul
Because often they kill it.
They say that some died because their soul died,
And that some men survived soul-less.
***
Slowly the sunset emptied the yards, and then the houses.
We didn't know that sunsets could go so far,
But then came the night, and it went even further,
At times it emptied even our life.
The only moon left was on earth. The burning.
No one could cross that night and remain the same.
***
One door is not enough to protect us from the whole night,
From so much death.
In the past, when people died slowly, it was enough.
But there are too few doors, and too many dead.
***
I don't know whose are the giant shadows on the walls of the world.
For sure, shadows are witnesses,
But I don't know if they witness the ones who were killed there,
Or the ones who killed,
And I don't know if the killers know there are witnesses.
***
We need at least one gaze to see us, to tell us that we exist,
Because the eyes of the dead are open, but they don't see us,
Because we don't know whose eyes we are.
***
The war goes further than memory.
We cannot bury all the dead,
Or maybe the dead can never really be buried,
That's why we don't have to remember.
We see them.
***
The night is dark, even though everything is burning.
And everywhere there is the loneliness of dying.
Yet, for a moment, a hand finds our hand,
And it is not simple at all,
It is as if we were in the first moment of the first creation,
And Man exists.
***
The night is too much, and also the rain.
We don't know who is alive and who isn't.
We don't know why we breathe water, and why our eyes don't tear.
We don't know how the war, all these dead, left death a mystery.
***
We don't know if the wind comes from afar .It smells of fear, of war.
But for sure wars go far, further than what we imagine,
Further than fear, further than life. At times even further than Man.
***
Usually we use only one hand. The other we have to hold our life,
But when we are in war we have to use both hands for the war.
That's why we die so easily.
***
It is important to avoid walls . People were shot there,
And their dreams remain stuck to the stones.
Some dreams can kill us.
***
The ghosts are alive, and we stand in the deserted streets, dead.
The night takes the silence and the dark from us.
Nothing is innocent anymore ,not even the innocent breeze of the night.
It is easy to lose your innocence when you see too much.
***
At times, when seeing is too strong, we stop seeing,
That's why we don't know whom we killed and who killed us.
We die with open eyes, and maybe then, we see.
***
The night is too much and also the loneliness.
I keep in my pocket a piece of the sheet of our nights,
And the shadow that your caress left on my body.
Slowly, you come to my bed
***
We fight so that there wouldn't be wars anymore,
But this war is not the last.
We are not a modern Malthus.
We believe that there will be a last war,
When it will not be too late,
When there will be at least one Man left.
***
We have all the right to live,
And yet, we die.
A bullet is enough to take from us the right,
This, and the shooter.
***
Evening, in the tent.
We stitch the torn clothes,
We stitch the void that killing leaves within us.
But there are too few threads, there is too much void.
***
The people who stayed in the deserted town
Knew what to do .
They turned on a lamp, so that the dead wouldn't get lost.
They lit a fire, so that their death would be less cold.
And the dead comforted them,
Because they knew that the people needed it.
***
We shoot people at the wall
Because we are afraid.
But even after the shooting we are afraid,
Because fear goes further, much further than the bullet.
***
At times, we kill because we are afraid,
But after the killing, we fear even more.
We fear the dead,
Because the dead are a witness,
And we fear their dreams
Because we don't know if dreams can be killed.
***
They don't know that when they kill us at the wall,
We take with us another wall,
The wall with the shadow of our woman, in the evening.
Because this wall makes all the other walls smaller.
***
Some dead leave tall shadows.
Maybe when they were alive they were bent because of sadness
And we didn't know it.
Maybe only the shadows knew that they were tall.
As tall as the sadness of many.
***
Some people fight for simple things.
For a door that has a home behind it,
For the happy soup on the table,
For a dream that didn't leave them alone.
But in war, even simple things are not simple,
And anyway, remaining alive was never a simple thing.
***
It seems strange, but some things steal our sky,
Especially the smoke because of things burning, of lives burning.
Maybe one day everything will be burned.
But we don't know if there will be still someone to see the sky.
***
The women wake up suddenly at night.
Women know when their men die,
Because women live inside,
Because inside you can feel better
A body that suddenly stopped.
***
The women lean their eyes on the window. They wait.
Maybe they don't believe there is nothing to wait for,
Because they love,
And because we are not Buddhists. We cannot believe there is nothing to wait for,
And live.
***
The night before you leave.
We are the first man, the first woman
But we are covered with a leaf of autumn,
And also the tree of life is half naked.
We don't know when autumn ends, if it ends,
We don't know when the leaves of our bodies will fall.
***
The people in the tent. The loneliness in the tent.
I would like to call your name,
The way two ships call at night,
In order to know where they are,
In order to know where they go.
I want to know where is your night.
***
At times, we return for a few hours home.
We are not a modern Joshua. We cannot tell the sun to stop,
Even though we need it badly,
In order to live a moment more,
In order to love a moment more,
So we return, in order to die more.
***
At times, between death and death, we want to shout
To make sure our dreams are awake.
But there are too many dreams,
And too few men to shout.
Maybe the dead shout too,
Which changes everything.
***
Our love becomes big, much bigger than what we imagine.
The beloved dead are in our love,
And all the other dead are in our love,
And because we love them, they are no longer nameless,
We call them by their nicknames.
Nicknames know us better than our names,
And often, love us better.
***
Some mornings, in the tent,
We hear a distant flute.
It is warm, because it is simple.
It comforts the dead
Because it knows they need it.
***
The women on the staircase to the world
Dream about their men
And slowly they knit the peace.
When you love, you knit better.
**
The women do their daily things, yet, they wait,
Probably they wait for what we wait for.
For what Mauthausen waits.
Maybe also those for whom it is too late wait,
Maybe this waiting was their last war, but it killed them.
***
The war is not only outside. It leaves voids.
But we are close because the void between us is full of us.
The quiet bread that made our mornings quiet.
Our bodies of love, our love, that absolved our nights.
***
There are too much smoke, and too much night.
We don't know what time it is.
We don't know if it is time,
Because time continues even when it should stop. When it is time.
And it goes on even when the world ends.
When there is nothing left except the smoke and the night.
***
When people burn, they light the darkness,
And the whole night burns
Like a bon-fire of people,
And the smoke cries.
***
The war is also the war of the animals. They know how to die.
There are the big tearful eyes of the horses that were left in an earth of ice,
And the shriek when their belly is torn.
And the dogs that cry when we cry,
Because they know how to love, and they die when we die.
There are many dead people, and many dead dogs.
And the animals are not afraid of the dead like us,
Because for them, death is not infinite.
Because the only infinite is life.
***
Alone in the watch
We look in the depth of the night
For the hour when we'll be men,
Where we wouldn't be, for one hour,
A machine of pain.
***
When our life bleeds
We cry like an animal in pain,
And it is normal,
Because pain is alive,
And because the machines of pain don't cry.
***
The mountain hanging from the night.
We sit on earth, and we think earth.
The earth is silent at night,
So we don't think of death, of graves.
We think of the field where we met your body of love,
Your hand full of wheat. You give me your hand.
***
The night, the smoke.
We sit on earth,
We feel the earth with blind fingers,
Because killing blinds the hands.
Also the body is blind,
Because it doesn't know where to find itself,
Where to find something inside it that didn't die.
***
The night.
We sit on the earth
And our face is empty,
Because it was too full of death,
And we have to empty it,
In order to survive, in order to go on.
***
We wait together, yet, alone.
Someone feels tired, because dying tires us.
Someone write a letter to God.
And someone is afraid of the night,
Because the night is blind, and it blinds his fear.
***
The guard walks behind a torch.
The torch becomes a face, a leg,
It becomes the fear of death,
Because the torch makes death visible.
***
The night, on the watch.
Someone looks for a piece of shore, a pebble,
That he carries always in his pocket.
The other looks for the sky,
He doesn't know the sky is empty.
And someone whispers Hallelujah.
***
The night and the burning smoke.
When they ask us why, we don't know what to answer.
We know so little, only that we love life,
But that was enough only years, ages ago.
***
Before we die , we dig our own graves.
A hard hole in the hard earth,
And we'll have to crawl into it alone,
Because some nights, the world ends,
And there is no one left, and nothing left.
Only the wind and the hard hole.
***
Maybe, in wars, people resemble each other.
Maybe it is the mud, or maybe the daily death, the loneliness,
That make us the same.
So we don't see the others, we are blind people,
Because we have to survive,
Because we don't resist to see ourselves in their face.
***
We walk and our feet kick the stones and the moments.
Each moment is a stone falling down an abyss,
But there are too many abysses: the night, the loneliness, death,
And there are too few moments.
***
Maybe we are not heroes enough, or maybe we lost too much life.
Maybe we could dig the whole earth,
Make a world of trenches,
In order to live a moment more,
In order to die a moment less.
***
We are afraid, and we know it.
Maybe, if we could, we would curl in a corner of silence,
Even if it would be room enough,
Only for the body, and the leg that was left,
Because the missing leg is enormous, and it cries.
***
We remember, even though remembering may hurt us.
The Sabbath on earth was beautiful,
And the world was round and clean.
Of course it was another Sabbath on another world,
Because the world is not round anymore,
All that's left is an abyss and a Sabbath of death.
***
Even if we could, we wouldn't stop walking,
In order not to think,
Because thinking can be bitter,
As bitter as the vomit of fear.
So we go on walking, and only our feet are bitter.
***
Time rolls as usual in the time of the world,
Yet, the moon in the dark seems like a sun,
Because we want it to be sun,
Because we need it to be sun.
Because we want to live.
***
We bleed, and we want to arrive to the shadows,
Because the shadows are safe.
So we crawl. We bend and unbend,
Our life- a fist opening and closing.
Our death- a fist opening and closing.
And also the shadows are a fist opening and closing.
***
The night is a wall, and also the cells are a wall.
Two cells. Two prisoners. Two strangers.
But the fingers make the wall talk.
One is silent. A silence full of death,
And the other smiles, his lips- a crack of dawn,
Which is also death.
There is so little life inside them,
But they are not ready to die,
Maybe they'll be ready the moment after the shot.
***
The night continues into the night,
Like the breath of a child,
And we don't know it will become a cry of a mad- man
That will madden us,
That will make us kill.
And no one can forget it, not even the mad.
***
We should put our ears on earth,
In order to hear the boots march,
In order to hear our boots march,
In order to hear our boots cry
When they are killed. When they kill.
***
The war can kill us, and it can kill also the dreams.
But some dreams don't die easily,
Because they are contagious,
And because we don't want to die.
So, there are many who dream them.
***
They ask us our name,
But we don't remember it anymore.
We know that once we had a name, a life,
But we forgot it.
Maybe, when we forget our name,
We forget also the life that had that name,
Maybe it makes it easier to die.
***
We and the small trench, after the bullet,
After the face that was gone.
We crawled in order to touch someone, in order not to die alone.
And it was the longest road of the world. The infinite.
***
A child cannot grow without dreams,
But when it is war, the dream is not easy.
The dream to be a child.
And to think that it is only one dream,
And so many children.
***
We have the name of many people
Because the war makes us a family of pain, of death,
And also of life,
And we are old fashioned.
Family is sacred,
And all the names we have are sacred.
***
The night and the cries.
We don't know who cries,
It could be even us,
Because we don't want to die,
Or it could be all of us,
Like a flock of fear.
***
The watch. The night. The smoke.
We don't know who approaches,
Maybe it is no one,
Or maybe it is all the people who fought here, in this place,
In another past,
Because wars have much past in them,
And so do people.
And the smoke cries, maybe for all of us.
***
We see the face of our son behind a black cloth
That makes his death more dead.
They told us there is no face left,
But how can a bullet take away a face, a gaze,
And the morning in the gaze.
So we die, simply because we don't want to live.
***
The hot metal smells of hell,
Because the bullets begin and end in hell
While they cross our cry.
***
The bullets shoot the night
And the night shoots us with bullets of fear,
Which is another kind of death,
Because there are many kinds of death
And we learn them one by one.
***
We don't want to die
Even though there is so much death in our life,
And maybe, not wanting to die
Is the only thing alive inside us.
***
The night is too cold to live,
But we have a few old pencils,
So we draw, like a modern Van Gogh,
Yellow flowers that are stronger than the sun,
Because somewhere far we used to draw children books,
And suns that were flowers.
***
Wars never end, even when they end,
Because they leave a mine-field inside us, around us.
At times we lose a leg, at times a hand,
At times we lose our soul.
***
Our boots beat the ground
In order to deafen our hear-beats,
But it is useless,
Because we are afraid, because we don't want to die,
So our heart-beat deafens our boots.
***
We are afraid of open things.
Open windows, open skies,
Because, here, death, the dark death,
Loves open things, and so do the bullets.
***
The bullets are blind at night,
But death is not,
It knows where to find us,
Where to find those places inside us that are still alive,
Because there are many small deaths
Before nothing inside us is left alive,
Not even the hunger for life,
So we die for the last time.
***
People forget
That tears are the same for everybody,
That even the cry of an animal in pain is a tear,
And that tears are not water. They are blood.
***
The night. The watch.
Our body loves itself again and again
Because it soothes the loneliness
And the memories of your body of pleasure,
Like the times when we were young, almost a child,
When we needed the soothing badly
And there was no one to sooth us.
***
It's true. There is only one world
And many people.
But it is enough for all of us,
Because life is a tree, like the biblical tree of life, with all our names on the leaves,
And because life loves many leaves,
It feels like spring,
Even though the autumns continue.
***
The bodies fall like bundles of old things,
And the bundles have holes, and the holes have bullets.
Each bundle has its own smell,
Because blood has its own smell, and the dead fear.
So we bury them with their smell, with the bundles,
And we bury them together
Because there are too many dead bundles
And too few faces left.
***
The dead were once alive.
They did the things the living do,
They lost their keys, they looked in their pocket for their coins,
And some twilights, they watched the birds over the house,
So death took slowly all the small things,
And then, it took everything, in one eternal moment.
***
No one wants to die,
Because we want to live,
Even with a missing leg, with pain that is a slaughter,
And a life that bleeds all its life,
So we live, death after death, until there is no life left.
***
We cannot accept death.
The mud in our breath, the missing leg,
Are not enough to accept death,
Because here, in this Paradise of death,
We've learned that life is the only religion,
The only thing worth loving,
And that the lives of the others are a religion too.
***
We are different, but also the same.
We have all the same night, the square night in the window,
And the night, the shape of our body, inside us,
And we all want someone to say something,
Because the silence smells like pain,
But we don't speak, because we want to cry,
And because everybody wants to cry,
So we say everything with the nothing.
***
In war, sometimes the skins change color.
Someone's skin is grey, because it became smoke,
The other's is white paper where fear writes itself,
And someone's skin is blue, because his blood is cold, too cold to live,
And the only mirror is the gaze of the others,
The moment they see us.
***
They shout 'go on', but we don't want to die.
We bite our silence,
We cry, because here, we learned again how to cry,
And they shout 'go on',
But the clouds are low, and the smoke is high,
And we don't know where to go,
We don't know why we go.
***
At times, we die easily,
We don't believe how easily we can die,
As if life were a thread that tears
When we pull it too much,
When we tie it too much.
***
People die, and their eyes remain open,
Like ours,
And there are a few tears left.
We never knew that death can see.
We never knew that death can cry.
Maybe we go on crying for long, much longer than what we imagine.
***
At night
We are strangers. We don't know each other.
But when our life bleeds
We cry the same cry,
Because cries are never strangers.
So we meet each other at long last.
We die each in the other's cry.
***
We walk, each alone in his soul.
Someone shouts, deep inside, where even he cannot hear.
Someone is silent, because it is the only way he knows how to cry,
And someone tells children stories
Because it is the only truth left.
***
Someone has only one hand,
But he feels the missing hand,
Because the memories of your body of pleasure are alive,
And because a hand that used to love
Is lost slowly, for years, for ages.
***
We are together and alone.
People who dig the night
And there is only one torch
To light the trenches in their faces,
And the hands full of mud.
Maybe it is the first mud of man,
And maybe the last.
***
We dig.
The shovels steal the earth,
The cold steals our fingers
And the dark steals our bodies.
The earth is silent at night,
It is ready for the dead,
And we are silent too, because we know it.
***
We stand for hours, for ages.
If we could only sit,
If we could fold our legs like tired sheets of paper,
Because our legs are written
With fear, with loneliness, with a children story that loved us
***
We sit for hours that are eternal.
Suddenly someone stands.
Maybe he is restless, because waiting for death makes us restless,
Maybe he thinks the snipers wouldn't see him,
Because all the death inside him makes him invisible,
And maybe he doesn't mind losing himself in the night,
Because he is lost already.
***
In order to survive
We have to negate the natural order of the world,
Because nothing is natural anymore.
We have to negate that the night exists,
We have to negate that dreams exist,
Because some dreams are not safe. They can kill us.
***
We look near, in order to see far,
Because if the night is here,
Maybe also dawn will come,
And the faith in the world is made of distant things,
Your hand full of dawn. You give me your hand.
***
Some nights, when it is too cold to live,
We remember.
We see you, your hand, full of summer, in the window.
You give me your hand.
But we have to stop remembering, because we die,
Because our life is too cold to live.
***
There are more crutches than legs.
At times, we point our crutch far,
Because the 'here' is a cruel place,
It killed our leg, and the leg is a child of the body.
And maybe the 'far' will purify the death of a child.
***
We are prisoners of the pole that ties us,
And we are prisoners of our body,
The cruelty and the pain that became our body.
Because the soul can go everywhere,
But the body is here, and the pain is here,
It has nowhere to go.
It can whisper Hallelujah.
***
Wars are enemies of the bread
Because they kill it
Before it arrives to our mouth,
Before it arrives to our hunger.
So some fight the bread,
And the hunger fights them.
Yet, the dead are hungry.
***
The streets of the night.
There was friendship, there was love,
And we cannot forget it,
Even though now the nights are bigger and darker, and the moon small.
Because some things change the laws of the world,
It becomes again the ancient world,
It is not round and it doesn't turn,
And the night continues.
***
There are those who look at the sky,
Not in order to see the God, but to see the birds.
There are those who believe in the natural order of the world
Where people sleep at night
And their sleep is not shot.
But there are too many shootings,
And too few birds.
***
There are those who tremble when they have to shoot
Because killing kills them,
Because some become killers
And some die when they kill.
***
The cell. The cold
We wrap our body, like the child of a stranger,
With an old blanket, that smells of the black milk of the night.
Because strangers come from places where the world ended,
And here the world is ending beneath the old blanket.
Yet, the night, the cold continue.
***
Some nights we are a child.
The sudden sleepiness and the hunger for warmth.
So tell the others to stay alive, to stay close,
Because we are hungry for people, for arms.
***
The cut leg is a child of our body.
We sing to it a lullaby, the oldest song that ever existed,
In order to put it to sleep, in order to be silent.
Because the cut leg is alive,
And it cries. It cries like a child in pain.
***
When they bury us, they bury us without shoes,
Because we can walk barefoot to hell,
And they bury many with us in the same hole of earth,
So the way to hell is not lonely.
***
Wars never end when they end,
Because they leave crutches,
And living with crutches is war,
Because they leave hunger,
And hunger is war,
Because they leave the dead,
And living with the dead is war.
***
Wars are always the same
Because even the angels kill
When they wear uniform,
And because we don't want to die.
***
The true mother-land is people,
And people don't want to die,
And they don't want to kill their mother.
***
The guns don't know we have mothers,
The night doesn't know we have a mother,
The fear doesn't know we have a mother,
And also when we die we don't know we have a mother.
***
Everywhere faces.
Faces of earth, because there is too much earth inside us.
Faces that have lost their face,
Because it is easy to lose our face in war.
Faces without sky, because we never look up, and there are no birds.
Faces of death because we died too many times,
In too many maps of our body.
***
When our life bleeds, we cry
With a mouth bigger than our face,
With a mouth bigger than our life.
We cry like an animal in pain, because animals are innocent
And they too have a mother.
***
The night. The smoke.
We don't see ourselves, and it is good,
Because we don't want to see ourselves.
The bullets don't see in the dark,
Not our bullets, nor the bullets of the others,
And it is good too,
Because we don't have the soul of a killer,
And because we don't want to die.
***
We lie on earth. We become one with the earth,
Like the dead.
Because we don't want to die.
***
We lie with our hands under our blanket,
Because these hands killed,
Because we don't know how to sleep with a killer,
Because we know we'll never wake up the same .
***
Often, the room where we sleep
Becomes a four-walled avalanche.
Everything is buried in the rubble of fear.
The sky, the dreams, and your hand full of sun.
I don't find your hand.
***
We kill in order to live,
But it is useless,
Because inside us too much is dead,
Long before we die.
So we kill in order that death will live.
***
They give us guns
So we wouldn't fear death,
But our hands are full of death,
So we fear our hands.
***
You speak to me in my dreams
In a language that doesn't exist,
Because here, each night,
Is an AUTODAFE of dictionaries and of people.
Everything burns in an immense fire,
Yet, the night is dark
Because the words sun, joy, hope, were burned.
They don't exist.
***
We are on watch,
And yet, we lose ourselves in dreams.
We dream about you, your hand full of summer.
We should stop dreaming, in order to survive,
But we dream in order to live.
***
The night, and the loneliness.
Any moment, the shot will come.
Any moment, summer will come.
Maybe we'll die when summer still exists,
And your hand full of sun.
You'll give me your hand.
***
Someone is silent
Because he stammers, and words are too stubborn.
Someone looks at the square night in the square window,
And someone cries because he has to kill,
Because in order to survive he cannot live.
***
The room. The night.
Someone tries to have his dreams back,
Someone- to have his leg back,
And someone remembers only your hand,
Your hand full of rain.
So we all live, at best, our half-lives,
Before there is no life left.
***
The night is a sack full of earth and graves,
And we carry it and the death in our body.
Because the dead should carry the dead,
Because they know where to go, and where hell is.
***
The night, the guard and the torch.
The light blinds us
Like the white-washed houses of a summer that died long ago,
And like you hand full of lime
That white-washed the sands where we loved.
You give me your hand.
***
Suddenly, the guns.
We hear the cries, the howls,
But the guns don't hear,
Because the machines of pain are deaf,
More deaf than death,
Because our dead hear us.
***
The night. The guns.
We run in the dark, and we don't know why we run,
Because death is everywhere,
Because it is also inside us.
So, it is useless.
***
The night, the deaths that become smoke.
What time is it,
And how can we believe in the world again,
If we don't know where times goes,
If we don't know where the world goes.
***
There is too much smoke
And we know it is the smoke of death.
Yet, we don't know
What time it is in the night.
What time it is in life.
What time it is in death.
And maybe, it is the same time.
***
Our bodies in the dark
Are like naked bones,
Because there is no flesh left,
The beautiful flesh that can feel the sadness.
***
The night and the mud.
Everything becomes mud,
The whispers, the silence, the world,
The morning.
And your body, your clear body, your hand full of rain.
You give me your hand.
***
Night. We walk on the leaves and we think leaves,
Because they bleed all their seasons in a rustle,
And because the rustle continues also after they die.
As if the sigh of death goes far,
Further than what we imagine.
***
If we could hide our face,
Or at least bend it, and fold our arms,
So we could feel there, alone,
The whole loneliness, and the field where your body that met our body.
And your hand full of wheat.
You give me your hand.
***
The endless patrols.
If we could stop,
Lean on the wall that the night became,
Take off our boots,
And feel the stones that our feet became,
And wash our life with mud.
The mud is innocent,
And so is your hand full of wheat.
You give me your hand.
***
The night patrols. We go together, yet, alone.
Someone looks at the dark, because he doesn't want to see.
Someone looks at the sky, he doesn't know it is empty.
And someone goes nowhere, even when goes on.
Maybe when we'll die, we'll go also nowhere.
So, it doesn't matter.
***
And the war continues.
Yet, even in the years without tomorrows,
There are crumbs of tomorrow, if we knew where to look,
And they fed us. That's how we lived.
Some soldiers are almost children, so they learn how to die
Before they've learned how to live.
Under each stone there is a cemetery of cries,
But there are too many cries and too few stones.
Some people who were dying wrote with their finger on earth
Their name and 'peace', but the boots of the next ones will take care of it.
***
We want to speak simply,
But here, nothing is simple.
Because hunger is not simple, because loving here is not simple,
Because dying is never simple.
And yet, we are poets, with wounds as big as our dreams.
We are the poets of the barbed wire in the belly of the night.
We are the poets of bitter thing, as bitter as the vomit of fear,
As the piece of our hand that we left in the hand of someone who died.
We are the poets of people who have to stand at night,
The whole night, until they remember nothing,
Until they die standing.
We are the poets of days that begin old, where we die young.
We are the poets who live with death closer than our life,
With the names of the dead closer than our tongue.
We are the poets of the rain walking in your shoes,
And your gaze that gives us water,
Of the sock, torn like a cry, that you mend, and you cry.
Of the sand in our pocket that remembers you,
Your hand full of shore.
***
Maybe we'll return one day,
And we wouldn't return alone.
We'll carry a caravan full of trenches, because the dead remained there.
We'll carry a sack full of names, and the names of the dead are heavy
Because the body of death is heavy, and because death is heavy.
And we'll carry a stone where our life can rest.
***
The sky, the color of a dirty shirt,
And the cold that has no color.
We feel cold, and our fear feels cold.
And also the barbed wires feel cold.
We leave at dawn.
Someone leaves his traces on earth,
But the rain will take care of it.
Someone bites his smile, the smile of a child, so that it wouldn't be lost.
And someone says that life is a pebble in his boot, that it cries.
So we cry with the pebble.
***
The tent. The torn cloth muzzled by the dark.
We are too many in the tent,
But there are many mouths to share the silence,
Many breaths to forget the rain.
We lean our loneliness on each other,
The way we lean at night on a dream,
On your body of love, on your voice: a woolen shawl,
We put our hand under your voice.
We remember someone who came, his face like drops of rain on the sand,
He took from his pocket some pebbles from a shore of other times,
And the night in his lips- another shore.
We remember someone with a sky of ash on his face,
And his hands clenched around his name, in order not to forget, in order not to be lost,
Like a child with a ribbon and his name on his neck.
We remember the noise from some tents, and further, the silence.
We remember the silence.
***
We know you, on the other side of our life.
We hear you somewhere, coughing the cold.
We recognize you under your helmet,
Even though your eyes are different,
And your hand of a child became a gun.
We know you have a mother who grew old sweeping the staircase to hell,
Sweeping cries.
So when you shoot me, don't shoot the staircase to hell inside me,
Don't shoot my cry. It is innocent.
***
There are maps where places have a name,
But when we are there, and it is war,
It is another place and it has another name.
It could be a train station lost in the nowhere, we don't know where it goes
But we know it will arrive to the nowhere of our life.
It could be someone who shows the picture of the smile of a woman,
And after the bullet the smile of the woman is stampeded in the mud,
And we can do nothing for this smile.
It could be attack, retreat, attack again, like sudden rain-falls, but the rain is innocent.
It could be the post man who comes in the evening, he gives us a letter,
But the bullet is faster, so only the bullet reads it, and the mud.
It could be the feeling of how strangers we are in this place, in this night, in this war,
Like the strangers that came to the city from places where the world ended,
And also here the world ends.
It could be the thirst, and our mouth peeling like a snake, and drinking the poison.
It could be the mountains behind the mountains behind the mountains
Where we forget where we are, who we are, and why we are here.
It could be the dead that continued to fight, because the war continued also for the dead.
It could be the memories of a home, all the smells of home, a home lost in the infinite,
Because the war makes many things infinite.
It could be the news-paper boy who walks bent, because there are too many dead in the papers.
It could be the loneliness, when each one curls in himself and speaks to someone only
He can see, because we always carry with us to war a face, because a photo is a simple way
To continue to live.
It could be the small things we do at night in the tent, in order to be somewhere else,
In small days that know us.
It could be the man who used to play on a comb, and after the bullet, there were only teeth biting the comb, but we like to think he still plays children songs and the cicadas which bring the summer, and the fields of wheat where the bodies of love, love, and in all the corners of the streets.
It could be someone dying with a shout to tell his mother that the war ended, because for both of them the war has ended.
It could be those who walk with closed eyes, like the windows of a deserted home,
Because they are a deserted home.
And it could be the endless walking, because the earth never ends.
***
LOVES AND DEATHS OF THE GOOD SOLDIER SCHWIEG, AFTER THE WAR
The big fire stopped, but the ash continued. It covered the streets, the years, the memories. There are voices without sound in it, muzzled cries. Here and there, the raised arm of a man
Who cannot find even a small memory to save him. The ash becomes a mask on the faces,
A blind mask, and we don't know who we are, why we are.
There are still snipers, they shoot the night and the dogs, and the dogs cry, because also they don't want to die. And the steps of the soldiers are cold, they make the street cold,
They make the night cold.
We escape, blind and immensly mortal, we leave behind the treasure of our sadness.
It is late, and the street cleaners sweep the drunk steps and the infinite loneliness.
The broken clock of the bell tower rings always the same time, the time of the dead.
So, it is the clock of eternity.
The city is closed because the doors are closed, because there is no one left to open.
Only the blood is here, crawling on the street, the god of the big roads.
Some one sells false documents, so we are quiet because we exist.
Slowly, the city is built again, the floors of the buildings step on each other,
But beneath them there are trenches and the bodies of the dead, and the cries of the dead,
But they are too deep, and it is too late.
In the broken tubes the water flows, it is mingled with earth and with the sadness of people.
Everything becomes history, incomprehensible, unique, and final.
Life, each day more excruciating, more vain, more infinite, invincible, irreversible,
Unknown, endless.
Because there is no other way, no other meaning except life.
***
The wind after the war is like the wind before the war,
But there are more holes in the walls, in the clothes,
In the hunger, in the tears, in the breasts of women
In the mouth of the child,
So it can go everywhere, it can make our life cold,
It can make it too cold to love.
***
The black years.
People turned around with their colored rugs,
Like a children game, that wasn't a game anymore.
They turned around their sadness, and they turned around in sad cities.
The beggars for life were many, but there were too many empty palms
And too few coins of life.
And the rage of the people is lost, then it comes back, and then, lost again,
Like the big breaths of the winds, like storms. At times, it went on the street, it shouted and it cried, because rage is pain. Only the women were not allowed to cry, because their tears
Blinded the rage.
***
People cry with all the tears that were drowned inside them,
Because the pain went far, much further than tears,
And everybody cried for the dead:
The cities, the rivers and the past: Spartacus, the MACCABEE, the mother of Gorky,
And the old men who cried for wars that were forgotten,
And also the dead cry, because they never wanted to die.
And we cry, because there is a huge coffin in the middle of the world,
In the: coffin endless dead, and our cut leg, and the face we'll never have again.
And we cry for all the dead we don't remember.
***
Some people try to begin again.
They white-wash the broken walls, the broken windows,
But they cannot white wash what they saw, and the bones of the dead,
So, it is useless.
***
In a corner of the street, a woman holds a child tight to her body,
Even though its cry pierces her breasts,
Because the cold is a killer, and because it is the child of someone who was killed.
Because she cannot lose anything anymore.
And because the child has to be silent. It is illegal to sleep in the street.
***
The wind after the war is different. It is more hungry.
It blows mostly in the women, because there are many women left,
And too few men.
In blows in the short skirts of the women of love in the corner of the street,
And they are many, because people are hungry for love,
And the women are hungry for the hungry bread.
It blows between the thighs of a woman who gives birth on the side-walk of life.
It blows in the yellow breasts of a woman with a child,
Because women love the children of the dead
And they give them the hungry milk.
Maybe also the dead are hungry.
***
The wind blows as if it were the only thing left in nature.
There is no fire, no water, no earth. Only wind.
Because the wind comes from places where the world ended.
Where nothing is left.
Only the autumn of people and the wind.
***
The after-war is a war too.
Because the trenches remain in our face, and they feed us mud.
Because the hunger remains hunger and it feeds us hunger.
Because the missing legs remain missing, and they feed us our cry.
So we continue to die in the same war, after the war,
Because wars don't end easily.
***
Our face, our teeth, our gaze are black
Because we smoke the cheap smoke that smells like poison.
We are addicted to poison because it kills what kills us:
What we saw, what we remember, and our hands that killed.
***
After the war, the tears are different. They are older, more final.
Women leave signs of tears on their black clothes,
Because their tears are even more black.
The blind man with the violin cries because the violin cries,
And because he'll never see his tears anymore.
People cry on the cross-roads, because the cross-roads are dead
And there is nowhere to go.
Maybe the tears will last more than death, so we'll continue to cry,
Because one life time is not enough.
***
We forget how to smile.
The smiles pull our face cruelly, they are wild, or even mad,
Because too many things died in a deserted trench,
And the smile howls like an animal in pain,
If we know how to hear it.
***
There are more beggars than streets corners.
There are more crutches than legs.
There are more bones than bodies.
And they all pray for mercy, but wars leave the sky empty.
So, it is useless.
***
Everything becomes harder.
The hunger hardens our mouth,
And the teeth that died harden the bread,
And also our face is harder
Because we don't want to cry.
***
Everything becomes difficult.
The crutches make our life difficult,
And life makes the crutches difficult.
Even the leg that we miss, the child of our body,
Makes the nights difficult,
Because it cries like a child.
***
The winds blow and they mingle everything,
As if nothing happens alone, everything happens together, now.
They mingle the voices, the years that were and the years that will be,
The broken hand of a beggar, the naked breast of a woman with her naked child,
In the street, the silent shoulders of a porter that don't know how to howl,
The street cleaner that sweeps the cries.
They mingle the gestures, the things that happened, the maps,
The bodies of love,, the hopes.
And the open mouth of the dead. They are hungry.
***
In the city
The windows are blind because the smoke of the war goes far,
Much further than we imagine,
The streets with the broken buildings, like broken teeth, and their heavy shadows
As heavy as hunger, as the dinosaurs that never perished, that shatter us.
And above, there is too little sky left,
Because the sky is mutilated, because the gods are mutilated.
Wars can do that.
***
The city.
The sun dies over the sick roofs,
And the old windows with the old tears of the birds, watch the world drowning, the light drowning, the years drowning.
The smoke from the woods muzzles the last sky, so it is silent.
From somewhere, an evening prayer, like a forgotten god that begs to be absolved,
But it is too late.
And the blind man with the violin soothes the pain of being alive,
Because the violin is not blind, it sees.
The bullet holes in the walls are silent now. Maybe they are dead.
The city disappears, unapproachable, only the staircases remain, and they go nowhere,
Like all the staircases of the world, because there is nowhere left to go.
From the broken tubes the water flows silent, infinite.
It flows under the dead, under the years. It drowns time and what time remembers.
A man sits by a woman. They are silent. They learned how to be old before they learned how to love. The war postpones everything. Even the time to love.
A guitar player passes in the evening, bent, like someone who goes against time,
Because he played also when he was young, before the bullet, and he goes against death.
And someone shouts: it is too late.
***
In the fields where our bodies loved and where the wheat loved
Old women gather grasses yellow as old paper, yellow as their gaze.
They'll cook their hungry soup.
But there are not many fields left because there are too many graves
And only one earth.
***
On the street
Some people speak, they almost whisper,
So that no one can hear them,
But their lips are hard, hard as bone, and they break,
Because there are some words, like hunger, like the death of a child,
That are harder than bone.
On the street
Faces as deep and as infinite as a cry that we can't hear.
Who cries. Maybe no one. Maybe everyone.
On the street
The dust from the war buries us little by little.
***
We hear the S.O.S. shrieking.
We don't know who is in danger,
We don't know we are in danger,
Because the world ended.
Maybe the wars will continue, maybe the dead fight the dead.
***
The war makes our bones thin.
There are the thin bones of the children, the thin branch in their back,
Because the hunger of children has thin bones.
And the thin bones of the bread, because it is a hungry bread,
So we eat crumbs of bone.
There are the thin bones of the crutches, because they are tired, they cannot sleep.
They remember.
And the thin faces, the thin bones of the jaws, because they didn't chew for ages.
And then, the thin bones of the prayers, because mercy became thin,
So all they can do is whisper Hallelujah.
***
The cross-roads are our cross, because they are dead,
Because we don't have where to go, and our prayers have nowhere to go.
They stay here, with us. They are hungry here, with us.
Also some faces are a cross, because they are faces of stone.
And we cross ourselves when we see them, because the stones are hungry,
And because hunger breaks the stones, breaks the crosses.
***
Some twilights, when it is very silent
We hear the dead from all the wars pass.
It is a crowd of skeleton, and the cracks of their bones make us cry.
Some walk on the skeletons of others,
And some pull the others from the mud that has killed them in the past.
And many walk bent because they are tired,
Because they began walking ages ago,
Because they walk on the bones of their children,
And because they'll walk up to the end of the world.
They don't know that the world has ended already.
***
The people see the army of the skeletons.
A woman kneels, like a cry. She thought she saw her son.
Also the broken walls, the shattered houses see them.
They cry because they recognize them, they recognize the child that they were.
And the clocks squeak because they see them, because time is pushed,
Because the world ends here, now.
And some women hold up their children like a flag, like hope,
Because they have to believe in hope, or in death,
And the wind blows in their cry.
***
One day the dead from the wars will return. Not because of a Messiah.
Because they never wanted to die.
They'll come from the trenches: the grave they dug for themselves,
From the cruelty of the mud.
The dead with the open eyes that no one could close.
The dead with the last cry that broke their face.
The dead that hold their heart in their hand so that it wouldn't fall.
The dead with the bullets still in their grey flesh.
The dead that cannot breathe, because they have no face.
The burned dead. Their skeleton a black, tortured tree.
The dead with the last tear in their eyes, because tears last more than death.
The dead that no one can kill, because someone killed them before.
So, they go on.
***
Some days the open eyes of the dead were the only thing that kept the sky from falling.
We closed their eyes, because we wanted to cry and because we didn't want them to see that we were left alone.
The dead were young and they died so fast, like a spring storm, like a night of love.
It is spring, but spring means nothing for the dead anymore. There are no birds in earth.
Someone whistled a tune, consumed by too many lips, and the bullet consumed him.
Some moments, when the mountains were all the blues that exist we felt suddenly something infinitely beautiful in the world, and the bullets that found us in the middle
Of all this beauty.
Years more mad than love, deep and invincible.
And time mingles all the wounds into one reality. The brave, the cowards, the saints, the whores, the beggars, the dream of a child, the solar system and the cheap lamp in a room,
The bread that is holy, the hunger that is holy, and they flow into the same eternity,
Because there are too many things and only one eternity.
No one remembers the silence of a root.
***
The wind tears the shadows.
Suddenly, an avalanche of light.
The blind, behind their night ,smell the light,
And us, with eyes that grew black from all the death inside us,
We smell it too.
Maybe there is a tomorrow, because we feel its steps in our steps,
Because the noise we hear, could be the noise life makes in the living,
The storm in the breath, the cry.
And because we don't want to die.
***
People are the true mother-land,
And the mother-land is people,
But after the war it is different, it is a harder mother.
The big bellies of the women are harder,
And the hands that till the earth are hard. They still till trenches.
And the dead are everywhere,
Because when we walk on a path, sometimes, at twilight, we are not alone.
The dead walk with us, and their bodies are hard from so much death.
***
When we fight, we protect many things,
But we always protect the playground of a child, our childhood,
And your hand full of leaves from another season.
When we walk into the war, we never walk alone,
The child that we were,
The dreams that were, the dream that was left,
And your body of love,
Walk with us.
The hand that held us was cut,
But our hand remembers it,
And it forgetting will be another death.
War is not a poem,
So all the poets can do
Is write the cry of the dead before they died and after they died,
And give a woman with a belly full of love and a dead man
A green leaf, nothing more.
Poets write about imaginary things
But we are all imaginary and real,
We have a real-imaginary name, and real-imaginary dreams,
And they write about a war that was infinitely imaginary,
Infinitely real.
It is strange.
Doors that seemed dead, wake up
When we close them for the last time.
We don't know how important doors are
And how they feel our hand, the way a friend does.
In war, the nights fall sudden,
They leave us unprepared,
Ready for nothing,
Because we are never prepared for death.
Because we don't want to die.
There are homes where people loved,
But the love became hard and the faces became hard,
Because they are cold, because they are hungry,
And because they don't want to cry.
We look at our hands.
We don't know where to hide them,
And we don't like them anymore,
Because they held a gun, not a child,
And because they killed.
At night we speak about small things.
It is easy to hide behind small things the big ones:
The loneliness of dying, the fear of dying,
The hand that doesn't exist,
That will hold no longer your hand full of rain.
We sell our wedding rings
And it is as if we sold a promise,
And the summer evening when we promised it,
And all the evenings that were a promise.
Some ones don't want much.
A street of people where dreams wouldn't be stampeded,
And the staircase of the evening where people talk,
Will be each evening here.
We were a lonely child
And we never got used to it.
Now, the trenches are the trenches of people,
But we are still lonely, because everybody is lonely,
Because the bullets and the fear are lonely.
The war makes the world narrow. A narrow road
Where we can walk only with one leg
And hold the other leg, the missing one,
The child of our body, in our hands,
Because it cries like a child.
We forget the songs of the people
Because we forget how to sing,
Because the trenches don't sing, nor the dead.
They say the bullets sing on their way to the dying,
And also the child inside us who doesn't know he will die.
We remember you, your eye-lashes, the flutter of a bird,
And your eyes, an infinite full of sky.
The fields where we walk are endless,
Like the bodies of love when they loved,
And your hand full of wheat.
I'll wait for you.
The places where people die because they wanted to live.
I'll wait for you in all these places.
Four walls are room enough for big dreams,
If they have a window,
A sky full of birds, the faces of people and their dream,
And your face, the feathers in your hand.
The world is born like a child.
Seven days are not enough,
Because a child is born for years, for ages.
It needs the belly of love, the breasts of love,
The dream of love, and a poet .
The bloody clothes of the dead
Become a tent,
Because nothing else is left,
And it concentrates the smell of blood, the smell of death,
That kills inside us whatever remained alive: the tears, the fear of death.
So we go on living, even though we died,
And the smells go on living, because smells go far, much further than death.
The houses in our village were built for life,
So the war shattered them,
And the broken walls let in the night, time,
And the death that sat on our chairs.
It is war, and yet the poets write.
They draw a picture of a home for those who don't know how to read,
Which is the best poem,
They write for those who drank with them the nights of winter, and they dream a moon.
They write for the street cleaner who sweeps poems and meanwhile reads them.
And they write for those whose body of love loved somewhere, sometime,
Which is another poem.
***
At times, we are not poets,
We are a stranger who walks in the infinite streets of the night,
A blind man with a violin,
And we sing to people.
We sing the hope that has no color,
We sing the love that has no color,
Because the violins are never blind,
Because the black years taught us how to exist,
How to die and how to sing.
So we sing in order to exist.
We sing the way we are born, the way we are hungry, the way we are cold,
The way we die, because we lived between one cry and the other
And we loved between one cry and the other.
We sing for those who are not cold anymore because the cold killed them,
We sing for those who died with a bullet in the head, before the world was shared among people, and all they shared was the bullet.
We sing for the sadness of those whose sadness is silent,, because it is heavy,
Heavier than a cry.
We sing for those who lost on the ground floor of life their life.
We sing the blood that is always red.
***
We are the ones who cry in all the corners of the world,
And we cry in all the borders of the world, in all the tongues.
We cry for the dead and we cry for ourselves,
Because we are the children of the dead, the children of death,
And because we don't want to die.
We need peace because we need life,
And because life needs us.
***
Hunger is a nomad in our life, and death is a nomad in our life,
So we rebel.
We shout in the streets like a child without childhood,
Like a cry that never left our mouth.
We shout for this cry, for the child.
We don't know how strong shouts are, because they began in the past,
And the past has enough future in it to become future.
And we cry, and our cries are stones rolling down an abyss,
And yet, we cry.
We don't know how strong are our hands, so we should use them carefully.
We should kill the hunger, and not the hungry.
We should know that the way to the tomorrow passes through our cry.
Most of all, we shouldn't forget to dream, because some dreams are contagious,
Because they become the dream of the people.
***
I would like to speak to you like a friend,
Like a priest of someone who has no god,
Like someone whose face grew hard because he doesn't want to cry.
I remember how we felt among people, among the hands that held each other's voice.
Because people can live, only when they live also in the life of others.
But the people dispersed, and the hands dispersed,
And yet, we live for these hands, for this voice.
And the memory forgives nothing.
The faces, the words, the gestures, hid us one from the other.
You, the bullet in your head protected you from your tomorrow's face,
From the tomorrow of your life,
Because the worst enemy and the most patient, is the tomorrow.
And you have to protect yourself from nothing anymore, maybe only from me.
***
The streets of people, of shouts and songs,
But the evening emptied them.
The bodies of those who shouted were stampeded,
And the bodies of those who were silent were stampeded.
Each one remains alone with his irreversible memories,
And we look for the missing leg, or at least crutches
That will lead us to our life.
And we lift alone, the weight of the black years
At times we cry like a blind man, but the tears of the blind see.
And we look for someone to give us absolution,
Because we are hungry.
***
The people were dispersed from the piazzas, and the voices.
And the years passed.
Doors closed and cut our hands, days closed and cut our life.
We try to come close to others in order to steal something from the habit to live.
Now, we say only small words that let us go on.
We know people who died, and people who insist living, and they don't know why.
In the evenings, the opaque light that makes our face opaque, our life opaque,
And the windows that grew old from so much seeing, watch the infinite sadness,
And the sky that was left empty, so it is useless to pray.
Our face is consumed because it was hungry for too many things.
Our lips are consumed by what they didn't say ,
And the neck is tired from waiting for the guillotine.
Now, the small square of light, when the door opens, opens for a moment our world.
When we'll die, we'll carry no prayer. Only the pain of a man.
***
The conquered ones cannot die, because they are dead.
We walk in twos and threes because we were alone for too long,
Because the war is a lonely place.
We look around without looking, so that we wouldn't remember,
Because remembering is pain, and we had enough pain already.
We steal villages and women, and we leave more conquered, more alone.
Pieces of our dream were torn from our hands, and some remnants remained under our nails. They hurt and they don't let us live.
We throw away the boots, the torn uniform and we remain naked with the lice, with the cry,
And with the fear of living naked.
The roads, dusty and bent, like old beggars. They stay for a moment in front of a door,
And then a small square of light opens, and they continue, we don't know where,
Maybe they remember the way to hell.
The dead sooth the earth, and we sooth the life we breathe, because life needs soothing.
And maybe we breathe the tomorrow, even though we don't see it, but we feel it,
Like the blind.
The conquered have the silence of the infinite, because death is silent.
The conquered begin in the infinite minus one, because the lost one infinite. The dream.
***
Some windows are open like a laughter, a white laughter.
And the tears for the dead are a pure, because they are the tears of the people.
In the prisons they still sweep the cries, but in vain, the cries carved the stones.
The new cranes lift our dreams, because dreams are heavy,
They are the dream of the many.
We want to build the world faster than the Creation, because we need it badly, because our dreams need it badly.
We dig our hands deep in earth, because the earth is not only death, it is also life.
Somewhere, the wind blows softly among the bananas leaves, and the bodies of love
Discover each other simply, infinitely, because there is no other way to love.
***
We want to be a man of the people,
So we remember how to love, the body of love, the belly full of love,
The tear in the smile of a mother, and the silent hand of people
That is another way to love.
And we like to sit on the staircase of the evening and to talk to people.
And we love to eat in the TAVERANS of people ,
And to hear the blind man , who sees dreams and he sings them.
We never forget to look at the sun, because it is for free,
And it is the sun of people.
And we should know that we are responsible for everything,
For the mothers, for the bellies of love, for the staircase of people, for the sun,
And we are responsible for all the dreams.
***
If we want to be a man of the people
We should know it is not safe.
They may arrest us. We may die.
But in the immense night of the small cell
We'll knock on the wall, and someone, or maybe many, will answer.
And we'll have to leave on the wall the traces of a man.
Our name. The date: Our own tomb-stone.
And we'll write' peace'.
So that we can die in any tomorrow.
***
Some things cannot be imprisoned,
Because they walk in the endless streets of people,
Because they walk in the endless songs of people.
And they are free, because they are free to love people
And their dreams are free, because they are free to love people.
***
There are places we never saw, but we know them,
Because our hands have the same trenches of pain,
Because we too, have mothers,
Because we also learned how to die, even though we didn't want to die,
And we saw blood where it shouldn't be, in the mouths, in the torn bellies.
We know all these because the language of pain is the Esperanto of the body.
But we cannot help them, because all we can give them is a leaf of life,
And the dreams of the dead.
And maybe it is enough, because the dreams of the dead go far, much further than death.
***
We love a city, a city of people, a city that people love it name, a city of smells, the smell of bread, the smell of a leaf of laughter, the smell of old women who sit on the staircase of the evening, and the small talk that keeps the world going.
We love the city where the streets of people cross and they meet each other.
A city that remember the child from Hiroshima, and the child from Dachau,
And it cries with the dead and with the mother of the dead.
A city with the horizons of people and of yellow flowers stronger than the sun.
We love a city with the vendors of dreams in each corner, and poets, many poets.
A city that kept beneath the dark years the sky and the birds.
A city that is drunk with the tomorrow.
A city where the rain is clear and it fills the trenches in our face, in our life.
We love a city where love has no color because it has all the colors.
And maybe you were always the city, your hand full of summer.
You give me your hand.
***
We love a river
Because rivers are always the rivers of people, because the people sing them
Some twilights when the air is calm.
Because its water becomes deep and infinite, like the past from where it comes and we come, like the tomorrow.
Because it cries for the dead, for the drown ones, and the cry of a river is pure.
Because it carries with wide fingers the bridges. People need bridges, and so do their dreams.
And because the river is legendary, and it becomes a legend of the people,
And because water is life, the legend is the legend of life.
***
We are sad people.
We don't hold the hand of the other because we lost our trust,
And our hand is cut.
The bread of hunger is dead, and we eat its dead body.
And the dinosaurs are back , atomic dinosaurs,
And we don't know how long can dinosaurs survive.
The mirrors that slice pieces of our life, and so do the clocks,
And the carnivorous hunger to write
Makes our life bleed, makes our poems bleed.
***
The city is closed and at night it closes even more,
Because each one is closed in himself, and the silence closes him.
Somewhere, the ruined remains of a church seem like the remains of a sad paradise.
And the steps of the night watch tremble, as if he were guarding a ghost world.
One day, when someone will dig, he'll find the skeletons of the houses
And our skeletons, he'll recognize the terrible human pain, because we find it always
When we dig the skeletons of people .
***
Some nights we approach the mirror, in order to find our face,
Like the blind, with our fingers,
But the fingers of the blind see, because they touch the world,
And our fingers are blind, because they forgot how to touch hands, lives.
So we don't find our face.
We lost our face in the war, because we were afraid,
And when we lose our face once, we lose it forever.
So we go on faceless and no one notices, maybe not even ourselves.
***
Wherever we are we are lost.
Who is the one who lives with us in the same house. We don't know him.
And the street of people and gazes, only the hands of the blind, like a fist of feeling,
Show us the way, because the touch knows.
Childhood friendships, prologues of love, are lost, because the children learn how to be old, before they learn how to be a child.
And in the small hotel, the man at the desk is full of drunk hopes and a heavy past.
This is the only thing he has inherited. And he is the keeper of the keys, and the loves that were lost, because they lost their love.
***
The city closes, people leave,
And all that remains are empty rooms, empty walls
With the shadows of pictures carved in them, like the shadows of the big void,
And these walls were all the eternal departures.
People say that everything will pass, but nothing will pass ,
Because there is the endless repetition of empty walls, of departures.
But also the immense twilight with the tremble of the distant lights will repeat itself.
***
Some are saints,
And the people who crushed forever their life, the life of a man,
They ask their forgiveness for letting them be so small.
These saints will never go to hell, because they are there already.
***
After the war, nothing is stable, and most of all people.
At times the mornings were infinite, like a children legend.
And at times we were narrow, unapproachable,
Because we thought of all the possibles,
And the war made all the possibles fear and pain.
And we tried always for the best.
***
Maybe the world after the war will be a new continent,
And a new capital of hope.
And the dead will absolve the new earth and the old one,
And they'll absolve the bullet- the killer,
Because they killed too.
***
The war has left infinite days, infinite tomorrows,
And we still fight the memories and the death inside us,
We still fight to keep something clean in our soul,
Because the soul killed too.
***
Children sleep on the staircase of the tomorrow,
But their tears don't sleep,
Because they know only the tomorrow after the war. The infinifte fear.
A man who lost his face and his mouth to a bullet
Sits and doses and the bullet still kills him.
And someone who was fired doesn't return home, because he want to cry alone.
Maybe he'll return tomorrow, a hundred years older, a hundred years more alone.
***
We loved life, we loved the dream,
But it was the strangest love possible,
Because we went on crusades, we shot, we raped,
Because we killed the life that we loved, and the dreams.
***
We were hungry for life, for big dreams,
And we are still hungry,
Because all that was left are the memories of death and the fear,
And they are an infinite poison.
They feed us, and they kill us.
***
The war closed many doors.
There is the closed door of the church, and a sad, faded woman
Holds an icon of a sad female saint.
So, there are two sad saints and the closed door of the church,
And they purify the closed doors.
***
In the street
The men lower their hats
So that no one will see they are blind, and that they want to cry,
Because the war blinded many things, but not the tears.
***
After the war
There are men who come to the small hotel, not for love,
But to cry near a woman.
But the woman has to work in order to live, and no one will pay for her soul,
And maybe she forgot how to cry.
Maybe one day she'll remember, she'll remember she has lost the deepest love.
A man who came to cry, and needed her in order to cry.
***
The city opens, and our thirst opens.
We drink the faces, the gazes and we get drunk, infinitely drunk.
And the world opens. It is like a book of mythology, but with no heroes, only people, and the dead.
Everywhere the gymnastics of life. We need the muscles of the soul in order to survive.
And we love all the women. The women who didn't fear the danger of a naked body,
And all the women we never knew.
***
Maybe the ones who died are quiet,
But we wrestle with the nameless funerary people and the nameless coffins.
Maybe we'll bury the dead inside us, like a small cemetery
That will travel with me, that will arrive with me to the time of being old.
Then, we'll stay.
***
I don't wrestle with anonymity anymore.
Whoever reads the poems will know they were written by the same person
In a long infinite autumn
Because whatever I write is an autumn leaf.
***
We live, so we learn the equations,
Like a miracle maker they enchant the chaos
Of the memories, of the faded life,
And like the big excursions they lead us further, always further.
***
The old ruminator animal, the memory.
We remember the sky of a child and the stars that see their death.
The deep moment where childhood met the infinite and the infinite pain.
We remember our youth and the student Mensa where the tired flies
Became a small, so familiar sky. We remember the man in the Mensa
Who loved people and cats and gave them the same food, because
They had the same, terrible hunger to live.
***
Time does what it is supposed to do. It travels.
And we do what we are supposed to do. We live, we gain, we lose,
And we cross the infinite each hour, each night.
Whatever we lived is lost.
Whatever we didn't live is intact. It is ours.
***
Maybe simple people don't know the laws of eternal motion,
But they know how to accept it. How to accept the mystery of the passage
Of time, because they had to learn how to accept other mysteries,
The mystery of hunger, the mystery of humbleness which is a deep mystery,
And they know the mystery of how to be rich with sadness.
***
The evening falls silent and irreversible, like all departures.
On the white and black tiles of the side-walk people move like Pons.
Maybe this chess play is the play of departure,
And maybe everything can be a chess play and a place of departure,
Even the body of love.
***
Strangely, we love the looters of eternity: the past, the deaf violinist whose violin hears,
The mute singer, because the best songs we sing inside us.
And even more strangely, eternity loves them too.
***
The tiny, imperceptible details, the vague gestures,
And the small postponements: the tomorrow,
Maybe they are the hiding places of fate,
Because it is easy to hide something big behind something small.
So it is the little words that we say just in order to say something: the later,
The afterwards, and other small prophets, that crush us.
***
Maybe, a poet is someone
Who writes a poem about pain, about the sadness of earth,
And the poem becomes a song, and people sing it,
And it soothes them
The way the earth soothes the dead and the roots.
***
Poets write about mornings unexpected, unrehearsed,
And of the immense twilight, hours unclear, infinite,
Full of beauty that is almost pain,
And people recognize the beauty and the pain
And they sing it.
***
Many things happen between two imperceptible moments,
Like the moment before midnight, a moment of the bodies of love,
And the midnight, the historical killer,
Like our life, our eternal life.
***
Time doesn't roll always in the same velocity.
Now-days it is faster,
So we live less, we die more.
Only eternity lasts the same. This, and the pain.
***
The woman and the small hotel at night.
She locks her memories in the small safe, so that she can go on,
And the body that has to forget in order to live,
Because no one wants to buy her soul.
And slowly her body becomes a cemetery
Of faces that may never have happened,
And of children that never happened.
***
People in the street often say; yes, of course,
But we don't know of what they are certain,
But at times, a small word is enough
To sooth the big uncertainties.
***
There are gazes without a face, without a gaze
That make the infinite street, the infinite life
Small.
***
Some people return, their face, a deserted home,
To a deserted home,
And this is the sum of the war. This, and the dead.
***
Women with withered clothes, with dying shoes,
Women of the wide fields,
And the soldiers raped them.
They are guilty,
Because the feeling of guilt goes far, much further than innocence.
***
The eternity of the trenches.
At times we speak to someone because we are hungry and the loneliness is hungry.
At times, we sit bent over our soul
We remember all the paradises of sin,
And the hell of a person who has killed,
And the slowly, infinitely slowly, we return to the trench.
***
In the war, many lost their face,
By a bullet,
By the shadows in which we hid, because we were afraid,
And the hats that covered some faces, because they sent others to die,
A killer hat.
***
We write about people for whom the small days are a killer,
And others that resisted, and won, and continued their faded life.
People who are poor, because they lost the hunger to live,
And people who are poor because their life is hungry.
Poets write people. Just people.
***
The earth does what it should do. It turns.
It spins the days, the nights, the passage,
The departures that never return the same,
And mostly it spins the dreams of people,
But some dreams return the same,
As if they were a different law of motion, a different infinite.
***
Somewhere we arrive to a small dusty place. Our life.
Whatever we touch, whatever we do is clay in the hands of time.
Everything changes us, and yet, nothing changes.
The old photos don't know how to forgive.
And the infinite inside us is blind and it blinds us,
Because we don't know where we go.
***
Pain. The infinite human pain can raise, high above itself,
Like a modern Atlas, the memories, the prophecies, the rocks in a cry,
And even higher, to mercy.
Generations come, sea by sea, they wash the world, but they don't wash away all the old lives.
So we can understand the infinite pain of the world when it bore war, death,
And the pain of a womb when it becomes a child, a poem.
***
It is the last evening.
The counter of time sits somewhere.
He looks up at the moon, and down, at the moon in the water,
And he feels an infinite mystery, like a child to whom someone showed something secret,
And he knows that even when nothing will exist, there will be a moon and a child.
***
The city, curled, like an animal that is cold.
A man and a woman walk,
And the street lamps give them a pale mysterious beauty,
The street lamps love mystery.
But, at the depth of the road, immense, invisible wait the tiredness of feelings, the habit of feelings, the daily deaths of feelings .These, and the memories.
***
Inside us: a sealed house, and sealed beds that make us cold,
But we stay, because of pity, because of the lost years that we lost together,
And because of the terrible need to belong to something,
Because we don't belong to ourselves.
And our life cries more often.
***
Maybe matter is the real god.
It makes us, it makes what we see, what we hear, what we say,
And also all those other things, the invisible, the things that cannot be said.
Maybe matter never began and it never ends,
Yet, we die.
***
We come from the fear of the snake, from the exile, from the first blood,
And from repetitions,
Because everything repeats itself, the fear, the exile, the blood,
But we come also from the body of love, and this too, repeats itself.
***
Women of the wide fields, of the immense loneliness.
They live this deserted love,
And they are deserted as if they were childless,
Because the children know them only as 'mother'. Nothing more.
So they survive, deserted, with big consumed hands, like a ruined altar.
***
Women of the wide fields and of the immense loneliness.
Women don't hide the secret of the small hotel and of the body of love.
They hide their deserted soul, because their men don't love their love,
And the soul is not a child of god. It is a child of love.
***
There are moments when we feel in our naked hands
Something infinite, like the need to pray to ourselves,
To our solitude, and all the solitudes that exist,
And this prayer is infinite, and it makes us infinite.
***
We live in the panic of time.
We love in a madness that is timeless,
And then, in a twilight that is quiet, and we are alone,
We realize that the panic, the madness are the same thing,
And the same, deep, unexplainable time rolls in their silent abyss.
***
We, counters of the hours.
Hours tall, infinite, even taller than ourselves.
Hours humble, where the eyes of the people make us even more humble,
Almost saints.
Hours of mercy, like a religion of life.
Hours where the slow despair closes us in its mystery, like a new hymen,
And yet, we loved.
Hours insupportable, like happiness, when life, the infinite life, cries inside us
Like a child,
Because life is a child. Our child.
***
We grow old.
The time that rolls inside us washes our innards,
It washes the sins, the virtues, the memories.
At times we dose between fear and the sun.
At times we sit, quiet, careful,
Like someone who hears something that happened slowly, for long for very long,
And then, the silence.
***
Women of the wide fields, of the wide faces.
Maybe it is the women who show us the infinite roads,
Because the body of love is endless.
Those who taught us how to remember,
Because the womb of a woman is infinite.
Those who have inside them the faces of many people, like mercy.
And those who cried like a hungry child, because they were hungry for a child,
Because the hunger of a woman is infinite.
***
We see people cut in the middle.
The head belongs to God,
And the rest, to a small hotel of love.
But they cannot love
Because they need the mouth, the eyes of love, in order to love,
So they are innocent and alone.
***
We have to escape the city, and we have to travel light.
We take with us the humbleness that made us small and infinite.
We take the window with the face of our mother, infinitely quiet,
We take the sadness of all the women we loved. A harem of pain.
We take the second-hand shop of our memories.
We take the hunger that we shared with others, a hunger as big as life,
And it fed us.
***
We leave. We travel.
We cross the infinite bent between gravity and the heavenly bodies,
And we are as light as a mad-man, as a razor blade,
As the pus of the past, of the war.
And we travel always further,
There where the universe arrives to the unthinkable,
There where wars begin. There where poems begin.
***
And we go on travelling.
We cross the eternities, the explosions of silence,
The meteors, like a moment of love, like the burning sweat of love,
The sadness of statues, the sadness that is alone,
The consumed sceneries of old wars,
And women, lonely as a legend, who loved poets,
And loved the poems that love.
***
And we continue the journey.
Days come like an immense waterfall,
And they wash the nights, the years, from the old pain,
And we see life and death in the indescribable card game of eternity,
And we always lose,
Even though we loved, even though we lived,
And we'll die.
***
We died forever
Like the grains of wheat.
We waited quiet, obedient,
For the teeth of the mouse,
As if we offered ourselves.
So, we were heroes.
***
Somewhere, sometime,
We feel the holiness of things,
The things we see, the things we eat.
We ask the forgiveness of the wheat, of the animal,
Of the knife , the one we forced to kill.
***
The womb of a woman feels life,
So it gives birth,
And it feels also the past that was the night of the bodies of love,
The night where the world began.
And it remembers.
***
Nights of soft breasts, like the body of love, like its love,
And somewhere it becomes the memory of something perfect,
That we carry and it carries us.
We don't know how to return to this something,
And we don't know that even if we could return,
The night of soft breasts may crack. Forever.
***
The hopes that were too big,
And we were too small. So we lose them.
A gaze we met one day, that changed us.
Words we wanted to say, and they remained unsaid,
Because we were afraid, because we were not ready.
And all those things return
In an immense twilight, among all the departures,
And we don't know where our life, our irreversible life, goes.
***
The pain after the war.
But we consumed our tears years ago, in days that were small,
So now there are no tears left and the big cry is a whisper.
And yet, each pain is a sad return to the humble, holy habits of life.
***
We keep always something that is our own,
Conquered from the others,
Or thrown by the others,
Like the terrible bread of pity,
Because the immense humility, like pride,
Is another sad way to exist.
***
The market. The smell of old fish,
And the sad people that buy there their hunger.
And the merchants look at the street as if searching for something,
And at night they touch their woman and they still search,
And we don't know what they are searching,
Because they are silent, and their eyes are silent,
Because it is something they knew and forgot,
Because they have to survive, to go on.
***
The earth.
The bearer of seasons and patience.
The purifier of our days with quiet repetitions.
The small cracks in its skin, like a woman's hymn, like the body of love.
The shroud-maker that leaves on the bed of a child a leaf of autumn. A shroud.
***
Our name is big and small,
Because our life is big and small,
And maybe our name is HUNGER,
Because we are hungry to live,
And we are hungry for the others to live,
And this hunger is infinite,
So it is a big name.
***
In order to speak simply about something
We have to know,
The way a children legends speaks to a child
Infinitely simple. Infinitely true.
***
We wait and we make time long, infinite,
And it makes our life small,
Because we forget that living is waiting. So, we live less.
And because we feel on our back the panting breath of time.
***
The sky, consumed by hungry gazes and hungry flies,
And it is empty.
The new poet of heaven and earth is anonymous,
Like the poet of a song that people sing.
***
They kill people
In an anonymous cross-roads of life,
And they crucify also the immense dawn, the world, the past.
They kill them,
And twelve people cry like an animal in pain.
***
The dead fall down on the surprised earth,
Maybe because their death was different. It was a new cross.
Yet, it covered the dead, it soothed them and the dead soothed the earth.
But the mothers of those who were killed
Buried them in their womb, where they belonged.
***
Somewhere inside
We still believe in the poet of heaven,
So whatever we do has something of the sky in it,
As if everything were the kite of a child, or a gaze of pain looking up.
And yet, the sky is empty.
All that's left are the kite, the gaze, the birds and the rain. The infinite rain.
***
Maybe whatever we do has some eternity in it,
Because whatever we do
Has the three times in it, the three infinites,
So whatever we do is infinite, and yet, we die.
***
A dead person doesn't die all at once.
His finger-nails continue to grow, the beard,
And we don't know if also the pain grows,
Because pain can be an eternal killer.
***
The ones who remained alive, forget.
All that's left is a nameless pain.
Maybe this pain remembers,
Because the body remembers. Always.
***
We broke the walls of the house
In order to let all the dead in,
But we were not homeless,
Because home is people and the dead,
The way a homeland is people and the dead.
And there was always the infinite tenderness of the twilight,
Even in the places where they killed us.
***
We don't know what day it is in the world.
It could be the first day of Man.
We don't know what day it is in our life.
It could be the first day of a man.
But we know what day it is in death,
Because everything is a cemetery of sighs,
And the immense sadness that even the blind eyes of the dead see.
***
The war was everywhere, even in the houses.
The little sister, the beloved one,
That hid in the closet and died in the closet,
And was buried in the closet.
And for us this is war. This and the love of a sister.
***
We go to the shooting fields,
And we shoot the wooden men,
As if we tried to kill whatever life the war left us,
Or maybe the war made us wooden men,
And nothing can kill us,
Not even the pain of remaining alive.
***
We return to the deserted houses,
The shadows in the corners seem like spider webs, maybe the dead flies are the years.
It rains inside and the dead are cold, their jaws shiver like disease,
And the floor is caved, deep, like a grave of a childhood , the immense childhood.
***
Some poems
Are a candle held in another night, in another world,
To see the face of the dead,
The soldiers-children that death didn't forgive.
***
The soldiers are almost children,
And some keep a toy of a child under their helmet,
Maybe for good luck, or maybe because it soothes them.
But the bullets leave no face, no toy,
So they lose in the same moment
Their childhood and their life.
***
There were too many dead, but we didn't bury them,
We left them in a cellar of our silence,
So we can come down and greet them.
But we felt that they never forgave us,
And they killed us little by little,
And we don't know how to forgive ourselves,
We don't know how to kill the dead.
***
Slowly, we become statues with marble eyes, marble tears.
And we don't know how it happened,
Maybe we had to protect ourselves from what we saw,
We had to feel less in order to survive.
And maybe, seeing less, feeling less, forgives us.
***
Crutches remember.
They know the day, the hour, where the sun was, the bullet, the blood,
And the leg that left.
And they keep inside them the missing leg, tenderly,
Because it was a child of the body,
And they keep the infinite sadness.
***
The war and the dead that forgive nothing.
But, at times, we feel inside us the power to forgive,
To forgive the dreams that didn't happen,
To forgive the hands that killed, and the bullets,
To forgive our hand and the bullet in our mouth.
***
Death is not a friend, but the dead were,
And they died so simply,
Maybe they were too young to know how to die in a different way.
We dug shallow graves because there was not time enough
And because we unburied them each night, one byone.
And the smoke continues.
Maybe the smoke os war is the Burning Bush and it is eternal.
***
Maybe our real life was behind the wall or in front of it,
And it was also the rain, because it rained everywhere,
Over the street with the close shops,
And over the newspaper boy with the news that were old,
And there is no roof that forgives us.
***
The bullets were everywhere, and some nights, also the endless conversations,
But it was the small silences that we bequeathed,
Whatever we had, simple things, too simple to be visible,
Left only the silences and the things that were invisible.
So we died with the treasures of silences and of the invisible.
***
The nights in the tent.
We spoke, we said things impermeable, hermetic,
Like all the big memories,
And it rained silences.
***
The wild animals and the smell of the dead bodies from infinitely far.
We had no time to bury anyone,
So the wild animals will bury them,
Because wild animals die too with a knife in their cry.
***
The deserted village, and so many dead.
But there are survivors, they are all grey, like a uniform of sadness.
And pain has broken teeth,
So they fall, but there is no one to hear their cry,
And mercy has a missing hand,
So it holds an umbrella of mercy with the hand that doesn't exist,
Because it rains everywhere, always.
***
The war said everything
And all that remained is the unsay-able.
So, we were silent
And no one forgave our silence.
No one knows about the tongue we cut one night
In order to protect us from our cry.
***
There is nothing left except the nostalgia,
Like a shadow that remained from everything,
And we try to sift its beauty.
***
We fought, like an ancient tribe,
Shouting, screaming,
And the women howled over the bodies of the dead,
Until we were defeated.
And we realize that the shouts didn't protect us,
Because shouts have fear behind them,
And also the silence wouldn't have helped us,
Because silence is strong, but we didn't have enough silence inside us.
So, we were defeated long before we were defeated.
***
We won.
We sent the captives to the concentration camps,
And at night we raped the girls and the women,
And from the camps we hear a song, sad, yet, harsh,
As if it sang the other war, more terrible, inside us.
And this war we lose.
***
In the town, the big gatherings, the big discussions,
Because the enemy is almost here.
But, not everybody came, so we wait,
And at twilight the shadows sat, softly, on the empty seats.
And the discussions ended.
***