THE CAPITAL LETTERS OF A SILENCE

REMEMBERING BRECHT

Raquel Angel-Nagler

***

The journey to human taught us
What wrong roads are, how to be lost,
And how the wrong roads taught us, again and again, the way home.
Mistakes have power.
They know how to learn, how to teach,
And the way home is power.

***

Wars need the merchants of humans,
They need to buy the humans cheap, and to sell them even cheaper,
And they need strong men, the ones who need more world.
And the merchants and the strong men
Need the war.
So, it is almost a love relation,
A small nocturnal hotel where love is money, and money is love.

***

We played theatre on earth-quaked stages.
We played the war. Wars love earth quakes.
Now, we'll play something different, another kind of earth quake.
We'll play the people.
We'll play you, we'll play US
The exquisite US, the big earthquake, the biggest.

***

SUMMER REPAIRS IN THE THEATRE
You enter the empty building,
But you are not alone.
Chagall on the wall, the builders in a deep crack,
And your thoughts. Thoughts are a friend.
You think of putting up a play
On the arena of blood: the war,
A play of love,
A play that loves life so much,
Enough to play for it,
Enough to remind you it could be
The most beautiful thing you'll ever have.

***

We meet.
We share a momentary gaze,
The momentary bodies of love,
And we are ready, from the start,
To wear our coats.
Ready to embrace, to leave.
We don't realize that moments are stubborn. A mule.
That this mule may carry us for the rest of your life.

***

You need the talent to be happy, to be surprised:
A small cafe, a banana tree- green sister, the cat, the acrobat in the circus of roofs,
A sudden body of love,
A poem.
You need to love life so much,
Enough to live for it.

***

When you own your hands,
When you own what they make,
Even the sweat you sow in earth, you sow in the walls of a home,
Has hope,
Has the joy of something new.
Remember, joy is an immense toy of life.

***

Two men walk in the forest.
Bare faces, bare mouths.
They walk and they speak,
And their words are a forest: the play of shadows and light.
They are old, old enough to realize
That the words after the war, the new age of words,
Have a new dictionary of shadows and light.
A new dictionary for the plate of soup.

***

In the clear sky: an airplane.
After the war, airplanes are different.
They are not vultures,
They seem like the ancient dream of flying,
They seem like the drawing of a child.
But wars are stubborn, they go on bleeding inside you,
Even the dreams are talons: they slit you, like the throat of a child.

***

In order to tame the river,
We have to tame its mouths,
We have to tame the power named water.
We build dikes.
The river passing through the city will be smaller,
The people will miss it, they'll miss its wide breath.
The people in the city know everything about the shops:
The fields of the city,
And nothing about the earth,
They know nothing about the terrible thirst of the bread,
The thirst that feels like hunger.
And it is strange,
In the war they were hungry.
Maybe we forget hunger too easily,
Maybe we should remember
That when the bread is hungry, it forgets nothing, for gives nothing.

***

AFTER THE WAR
Someone reads poems,
The poems write the hungry bread, they write the wall where people were shot.
He reads them to children,
And he cannot decipher the exquisite smile of a child
When he doesn't understand.

***

TO THE STUDENTS IN AGRICULTURAL SCHOOL
You came here.
You have to study seriously,
The way one studies the roots of his bread,
The roots of hunger.
And you have to remember all those who struggled so you'll be here.
Their blood was serious.
Life is a serious work,
And living is an act of faith. It is serious .

***

Maybe somewhere, we'll have time enough
To remember where we came from: the past,
The big old thinkers, the big old painters.
Maybe somewhere,
We'll have time enough
To learn where we are now, who we are, where we go,
To know to which station the journey to human arrived,
The endless train.

***

Peace needs also bullets
To protect it from war,
But as long as there are bullets,
There will be no peace.
Bullets have the nature of a killer, they were born to kill.

***

If I'll have a tombstone
I want it to write:
She made the journey to human,
Yet, she was never free.
Poems are big slave traders. The biggest.

***

We die
And we leave our past behind us,
We fill the world with past,
There is no room left for change.
We paralyze all the laws of humans,
But we cannot tear even a leaf from the laws of nature, a leaf of seasons.

We die, so the fear of death leaves us in peace.
We miss nothing, because we miss,
And we have to understand nothing.
Death is the big explainer. The biggest.

***

Strange things happen.
People become friendly.
Even the market of human hands is gentle
The healers try to heal the disease of the century: the hunger.
The journalists use more truth.
And this is only the station number ten in the journey to human.
The journey is endless.

***

A TOMBSTONE FOR A FIGHTER FOR THE PEOPLE
He fought against war, before it was too late,
He fought when the cemeteries were not the only city left.
He died between the too soon and the too late.

***

TOMBSTONE FOR ROSA LUXEMBURG
Rosa Luxemburg
You were a polish Jew,
A fighter in the war for bread.
You were killed as a fighter,
But anyway, you would be murdered as a Jew.
You died twice in one death,
But I believe you died more, much more than twice.

***

The war.
You are alone in your eyes, alone in your darkness.
You feel that nothing was left
Except the sliver of the moon.
No world, no cities of people.
And the moon is only a sliver.

***

AFTER THE WAR
The cities were ruined, the machines burned.
You had to build everything, like the ancient men.
With hands of stone, with the cement of sweat.
You had to build again the way home,
The way to who you are.

***

It is twelve o'clock.
It is the twelfth station in the journey to human.
We delayed this station for too long,
Life waits for no one.
The twelfth station is a journey too, the biggest journey.
It is the journey of the people to their mind, to own what they think.
It is the journey of the people to their hands, to own what they make.
It is the journey of the people to their life. To own it.

***

We say: the new has to defeat the old,
But the future is full of past,
Where we began, where we came from.
But the nice thing is
That the past is full of future,
So the new man we all talk of
Has a good chance of walking on this earth.
He will be of the family of the past,
Of the family of the future.

***

The waves in the river are always different.
They are new and old at the same time.
In the river of time, we are the waves.
We try to grasp time, we try to hold the water. In vain.
We need a painter
To draw on a canvass the river.
We'll be able to hold time,
We'll be able to hold the fish of time:
Our minutes. Our days.

***

The farmers go to the forest.
They are fruit gatherers.
And the some singers sing a song
In the forest's glade:
They gather the exquisite fruit
Of the human voice, of what a human feels.
Maybe we don't realize it,
But humans are fruit gatherers by nature:
The bitter fruit. The exquisite fruit.

***

We can hear our voice everywhere,
If we know how to hear.
In a storm, like a shout that comes from somewhere else,
And yet, it shouts in our mouth.
In the river of humans, the waves that are
Always far, always close,
In the rain that falls into our life.
There is no umbrella for the voice.

***

The war has built strange houses for us:
Fallen stones, flying roofs, the glass made of cracks.
The house is immense, it opens into the world,
And yet, like the war, it rains ice into our life.
It kills us.

***

You work too much, you are exhausted,
So, when the speaker speaks too much,
You are too tired to find the truth among his words.
Maybe the truth needs few words: a mug of fresh water.
After all, it has to awaken you.

***

You survived in dead cities.
You survived the death inside you.
Remember,
Wars are blind,
The bullet never sees your face.
Don't let the blind- blind you.
Don't let them blind your city, your life.
Don't go blind into new wars,
Remember: wars are never new, they are full of past.
Remember,
Mothers were never blind,
The death of a child is never blind.

***

A POET IN EXILE
You left, the war chased you. Wars don't trust poets.
But, you didn't really leave,
Your poems remained here.
We need your poems.
The ruins of the cities need beauty,
The ruins of a man need beauty.
We need your poems,
They know the way home.

***

NECROLOGY TO THE 20TH CENTURY
It was an age of death,
The one that killed you
When you were hardly born.
And you have no choice,
You bury everything inside you
In a place where you died long ago.
A child that was the biggest cemetery ever.

***

You had no faults, except one:
You knew how to love.
You loved life so much,
Enough to die for it.
But the bullet that found you
Knew nothing about love, nothing about life.
It knew everything about death.
Yet, bullets can't kill the past,
They cannot kill the one fault you had.

***

The theatre of the new age
Came on the wheel chair of Mother Courage
Rolling in the broken streets of Berlin.
The wheel chair and the Mother
Were a sad child of war.
They were a cry.
The wheelchair carried the mother,
And it carried the Courage to cry
Like a child, like a mother,
Like a human who is too tired to die for someone else,
For a wandering vendor of wars.

***

We should choose our songs among all the songs,
A song that know us.
We should let it be sung on all the stages.
Actors know how to feel what the poet felt.
And we should let it be sung by the people,
The iron voice of a man, the careful voice of a mother.
When people sing a song, they make it different,
They bear it each day more, each day deeper.

***

Whoever we are: actor, poet, healer,
We should work seriously.
Life is a serious affair,
And we shouldn't forget it.
Even the clown
A man alone in the arena of laughter,
Is a serious work.

***

THE BRITISH IN EOROPE
Hear,
You farmers in Flanders,
You farmer in Italy,
You, sailors in Greece.
The ones who come to rule you,
Despise you, in a polite way,
They'll sell you, in a polite way.
But you should know they fear you.
Fear is never polite.

***

SOMEONE FEELING BETRAYED BY A FRIEN
Maybe you feel whatever a poet feels
When the words don't hear him,
When the images are paralyzed, they go nowhere.
Maybe you feel the way a painter feels
When he cannot hold the river of time in the paint,
When the fish of time: the moments, the hours of painting,
Float belly up, naked as death.
The motion of a poem, of a picture, the motion of love,
Are the motions of a body at an open door:
An act of faith.

***

The strongest one is the one who remains. The last one.
And the last one cried like an animal in pain,
He had to resist the blood in his breath,
To crawl, like the rain, in the mud,
In order to arrive,
To be the only one who remained.
The loneliness of the last one is power.

***

THE SECOND WORLD WAR
There are those who blame the war,
The war which was utterly necessary.
The concentration camps should have been painted in pink,
They should have been more polite.
The slaves in the factories of death, should have been called soldiers,
The great honor.
And the church believed the war should have been more holy.
We should have learned how to kill politely. Pretty. Holy.

***

We were slaves in the factories of bullets.
We ate the bread of hunger, we drank the sweat, the only water available.
We were defeated from the start.
That's how we went to war.
One defeat was not enough.

***

The soldiers
Bought the bodies of love of women, wives of defeat.
They were cheap, they cost almost nothing.
But the body of a Jewish woman, half dead, half silence, half cry,
Nothing could buy her.
She was the last survivor of a tribe.
She was alone, and there was too much past to protect.
She couldn't sell this past.

***

The ancient gods, deep in the caves of the rocks,
In the caves inside people,
Became holy in a new way.
They were immense, pure till harshness.
They had whatever face the people needed.
Their bullets were sacred, golden as prayer.
They shot people at all the walls of the world.
They shot pain, they shot hunger.
The shot the traitors:
The ones who were too hungry to pray,
Too hungry to believe.

***

Money is paper, weightless, almost invisible,
And yet, it can give you a paradise on earth.
It is god.
But for the farmers,
Those who sow their sweat, their hunger,
There is no prayer to save them.
There is no paradise for hunger, no paradise for sweat,
Paradise costs, and they cannot afford it.

***

Somewhere, a good man built tracks,
The tracks for the journey to human.
But when you look, you don't find the tracks.
You don't realize you are on the train
For longer than what you imagine.
The tracks are endless,
But you cannot see the tracks from the train.
The person in your head is free. He had a choice. He took the train.

***

The great dreamers discovered another world,
A world of people, a world where hunger is not a home.
They knew there will be struggle,
They knew how to be patient in the wars of bread.
The only thing that tired them were the laws of hunger, the laws of the bullet.
Their dreams were a compass,
The journey to human was north. Always.

***

The city.
The only nature is the smoke over the roofs,
The wild forest fire in the ceiling,
And the blind cotton: the curtains, inside them the wooden windows.
And the human nature is everywhere.
The tribes of the city go to work,
Exhausted from their sins, from the sins of others.
The human river flows into a dam, the dam that paralyzes them : the office.
The dam is thirsty, the paralyzes is never enough.
In the empty street, the motions of those that the river vomited. Dying fish.
They were fired.

***

THE ENGLISH OCCUPYING GREECE
The big-mouthed words are often the smallest.
Smaller, much smaller than a human.
They are not at the height of your eye. They don't dare looking I to I.
They watch the motions of the hands: they can sell them.
They see the motions of the sweat: another merchandise.
These words are dangerous.
They may be small as a bullet.
It is easy to hide big things behind small ones:
A paper lips, the lips of money, behind a bullet.
They kill you at all the walls of your land.
They make your dying body bow.

***

You believed. Your belief is yours and it is ours.
Belief is power.
Maybe we chose the wrong path,
But you were strong enough to follow us.
Maybe we were defeated,
But you were strong enough to be defeated.
You were strong enough to win yourself.
To defeat your defeat.

***

We invented the laws of human nature:
The big market, the merchants. They sell human hands.
And then we understood the laws of nature: the atoms, the electrons.
We invent something bigger, much bigger than ourselves.
We invented the end of the world.

***

I don't know if god exists, the miraculous god,
If we need him.
After all, he gave hunger to the hungry, he made hunger holy.
He gave pain to pain, he made pain holy.
Matter, the infinite matter, the changeable matter,
Is miraculous in a different way.
It has the shape of everything that exists, water in the body of a jug.
It is in the hands we sow, it is in the seeds that sow our hands.
Sowing is power. Seeds are power.
And matter is playful. It changes its habits,
It changes our motions of living, endlessly.
It leaves no boring moment. Playing is power.
For me, matter is enough.
I don't know if god exists,
I don' know if it matters.

***

They teach us from the first moment of the first hour,
To turn around those who are stronger,
No matter if they are a sun, a planet, a small moon.
We are dizzy, dizzy and lost,
But we are god fearing. We turn.
Yet, there are men, the person in their head is free,
They don't turn.
They are the men who the gods fear.

***

If we ask someone whether god exists,
If our whole life waits for an answer,
It means we create a god, we create the after life. Amen.

***

Somewhere we stand immobile, paralyzes fish in glass.
An aquarium.
Somewhere we learn that everything turns, everything changes,
Nothing is paralyzed, not even the fish in the glass,
That we travel people, the fish, the aquarium, in a huge orbit.
Life is still a tight alley of glass, and fear too.
But change is power,
And the orbit is immense.

***

We learn everything about nature,
About the eternal change,
But until we learn everything about people,
About their motions of living, of loving,
About their journey to human,
The eternal journey, the eternal change,
We learned little.

***

I was pure once.
I was a woman stronger than herself,
They way quiet water can conquer the storm of thirst.
She loved me, the way quiet water loves.
She followed me, the cruel river in my eyes.
And yet, she was human. She had a choice.
Some nights I hear her whisper:
I loved the way one loves his thirst. I had a choice.

***

The world is power.
Maybe the only way to conquer it is to sell its treasures.
We build in the middle of the world
The biggest slave market.
We sell human hands, the deepest treasure.
We don't know that slave traders are slaves too.
Paper slaves to the paper god.
We don't know that when the paper will burn
It will be a wild forest fire,a big fire, the biggest.
We don't know that one day, the paper will die.

***

The journey is harsh.
Some strong men showed us their road.
But all we saw was blood. The road to blood, the road that was blood,
We saw the blood and the terrible thirst.
The maps were thirsty. They were thirsty for more.
Maybe, one day we'll tear these maps.
Maps are power, even though they are paper.
Maybe, one day, we'll draw our own map.
We'll draw the first station in the journey to human.
The endless journey that makes us endless.

***

The strangers from the side walks of life
Don't mind where they live.
They can be hungry everywhere.
Maybe, when the Patria is cruel,
You realize that the only home land are the people,
When it rains into your life, they are an umbrella of mercy.
You become a people'patriot.

***

Wars are a strange affair.
The only ones who gain are the hungry,
No matter what side of the fire they stood,
They gain more, much more hunger.
It is what they gained that kills them.

***

Wars are a tidy place.
They give us lists of names, of borders, of the dead: the last borders.
They give the people a purpose: the Patria, the enemy: the name of sin.
There are places that forgot the wars,
The only Patria are the homes in the villages, the people are the floors, the roofs, the windows, the doors.
These people call each other only by nick names, like an old friend.
And there are no lists . Life is an untidy place.
And I don't know if wars can pit order in pain.

***

I saw the god of war in the dead bodies.
They were young.
Maybe the god of war loves the young because they are innocent.
I saw him in the thighs of women, the raped seed.
I saw him in the biggest killer: the hunger.
The god of war is carnivorous.
He devours the lambs, the goats, and sometimes, human sheep.
I saw him in his tremble, I saw him with a knife in his cry.
After all, there are still human, the person in their head is free,
And they love life so much, that they are ready to die for it,
They are ready to kill for it.

***

Wars are a suspicious creature.
They leave always moments of truce,
Moments where you can sow seeds in the slaughter,
The seeds: tiny suns, mad sperm.
Seeds are power, and sowing is power. You need power to own them.
And this truce, these seeds, this sowing,
Make the wars endless.

***

I don't know who is more carnivorous.
Looting the money of people in all the banks of the world,
Chewing them, the pocket, chewing the last skin in the pocket,
Or putting a human at the money desk,
Devouring him,
His hands that became paper, his soul that became paper.

***

There are no saints anymore, no bibles.
Hunger, pain, are no longer a promise of paradise,
They are a crime against the laws of the city, they disturb the tidiness.
They are guilty.

***

Wars are an expensive affair,
So, they give hunger to the people, they give people to hunger,
They say that hungry men fight like despair: better.
And the mothers, the infinite eyes of a mother,
Find no longer angels in the sky.
They find the iron birds.
They don't know iron has no feelings,
They don't know there is a man inside.
They don't know that souls can become iron.
They don't know that in the dictionary of iron the word mercy is rusted, illegible.

***

We were dead long before the last war.
We were dead for so long
That we didn't have a face, eyes.
Maybe until the people will be at the twelfth station to human,
The midnight before dawn,
There will be only first wars.

***

There are two worlds: up and down.
The ones down sow their hands in the earth,
And the ones up,
Sow gold, they pray to it.
The ones up don't know that gravity is cruel,
That one day they will sink,
The gold becomes heavy the moment it becomes gold.
It will sink them, it will sink them like a sun set.
There will be only one world left, one dawn,
And the dawn will be for everybody.

***

Bridges measure the distances between us,
Like the language the cities speak,
The Alpha Beth of loneliness, each day from the beginning.
A language that is a silence in words.
If we fill up the bridges with people,
The loneliness will be immense,
There will be no room even for a whisper.
Loneliness is a cold place, it will be a glacier of people.
There will be no room for the toy of life: the warmth, inside us.

***

THE GERMEN IN WAR

We grind human bones in the factory of bones.
We don't realize that our finger nails betrays us,
That the human fat in the nail is a Cain mark . Inerasable.
They 'll never be tidy, clean or even human.
We don't know that the fat in the nails seeps inside us,
Rancid, poisonous.
We'll die from inside out.

***

Politics is everywhere,
In the way we live, the way we speak, the way we see, the way we don't see,
The way we mind about the motions of living, ours, others.
At time we mind so much, that we live for it. Each day more, each day better.
At times, we mind so much, that we die for it. Each day further. Each day deeper.
There are people who don't mind, they are too tired to think,
They live, they die, simple as the seed they sowed.
And this life, this death, this seed, this sowing are the deepest politics.

***

We learn how to fear men,
So we say yes to the mercenaries, to the shooting at the wall.
We learn how to fear ourselves, to fear the big mine field inside us. The biggest
Fear is power. It kills from inside out.

***

Workers
Have only one religion: the work.
And hunger is the best demon. Demons are always hungry.
So, when they are fired, and condemned for something : the silence, the cry,
They swear in court on no book, no bible.
The only god: the work, is not here, he is in another somewhere,
And they cannot swear on the demon : the hunger.

***

Some problems are easy to solve:
The hunger, the homelessness, the death of a child.
They decide these are no problem,
So, there is nothing to solve.
They don't realize that behind the problem there are humans,
Behind the problem there is power.
Maybe, one day, there will be a struggle,
The struggle will make the problems real.
The struggle will make the power inside the hunger real.
Problems are power. We should learn how to use it.

***

In this world, with these gods,
Peace is a seed of blood.
Wars begin from such seeds,
The way the desert begins
From the terrible seed of thirst.
It is not easy for your motions of living
To move in this peace, in the seed of blood, in the seed of thirst.
It is not easy to realize these seed will kill us.
Seeds are a big power. The biggest.

***

They say it is wonderful to die for your home land,
But death is never wonderful,
There is nothing wonderful in life, rolling like a stone into the abyss.
There is nothing wonderful in living at the edge of the abyss,
To know you are the stone.
There is nothing wonderful in a home land that makes the strangers- strangers.
The big homeless of the world.

***

It is easier to speak about death, than dying.
It is easier to hide the big fear behind something small: words.
But it is not easy to hide it in our silence: in the tremble of a comma, in a full stop.

***

The war that will come wouldn't be the first war,
But we know it will not be the last .
And we know that will happen after the last war:
The hunger of those who were always hungry, will be more.
The true conqueror.
No matter who conquered whom.

***

War is a god.
It gives a men its face, its shape.
They may become carnivorous, like the war.
They may be drunk, like a mad sperm, like war.
They may forget their name.
The name of a human is important.
But there are human whose person in their head is free.
They fight the way they live.
Life is a serious affair. They are sober, clear, they forget nothing.
They fight like someone who has an unclosed account with war.

***

You fight. You bleed.
You believe that the war is a promise.
You forget that the war is the war of the bread . The promise of crumbs.
Crumbs are fragile, they are harsh. The broken glasses of the bread in your lips.
You forget the infinite motions in the hands that sow,
The infinite motions in the lips that eat,
For these lips, even the infinite is not enough.
You forget that wars end in the most cruel way.
The end of the bread. The beginning of new-old hunger eaters.

***

Hunger is a seed. It has power.
It sows the earth with its seeds,
It sows the earth with the seeds of war,
The wars of the bread.
A seed, no matter how small, can begin a war
If the hunger is ready, if it feels the stones in its teeth.
If it feels the rage of a stone.

***

We are human. The person in our head is free.
So even a dream, if it's human, if it is alive,
Can be a killer,
If the human is ready to die, to kill,
For life.

***

They shoot people in the street.
The gun is innocent,
But the hands that held it, the gaze in the fingers,
Are guilty.
The gun is innocent. It is hand made.
The same hands that shot.
Our hands are god.
They make us. They kill us.

***
THE GERMENNS IN THE WAR

Everything is hand-made.
The big iron insects, the bullets, the metal in the birds.
Everything is hand-made, even the violence.
I look at a picture of Auswitz,
The living dead, the living pain, the barbed wires in the bodies, in the eyes.
I look alone,
My family bleeds in my eyes,
My family is in the barbed wires,
My family with hand-made love.

***

There are too many bullets,
And only one war, the war of the bread.
You have to discern, behind the faces, behind the words,
Who you fight.
Who sells your hands in all the markets of the world,
Who keeps the hands cheap,
Who keeps the hunger big,
As big as the eyes of a child. There is hunger in the eyes.
They are big, bigger than his face, bigger than his life.

***

You proceed, no matter if you fall.
When you fight,
You use your deepest hands. The hands are iron.
Remember,
Behind the face, behind the slogan,
You should know who you fight, with whom you fight.
Remember, your bullets kill. They kill life.
Remember, beneath the iron your hands are human,
The sad hands of a human.

***

The struggle is no longer a living river.
It is still, a dam of water.
It has nowhere to go.
You are thirsty,
And the only one to ask the why, the how,
The only one who can answer
Is you.

***

Poetry is a harsh mistress.
It is not easy to pass in the market of phrases,
To sell your words like old fish choking in a paper,
When you feel they were caught in a clean river, in a clean morning.
It is not easy to shout in order to hear your silence.

***

Yoy are ready to do more, much more than you imagine,
In order to protect your butter. It is essential.
You muzzle your truth. Truth is a dangerous animal,
And little by little you give another meaning to what you don't say.
You claim that the market of fatigue, the market of hunger,
Are natural, unstoppable. The autumn of a leaf.
You don't realize that autumn is a power,
That it forgives nothing.
That each leaf should forgive itself.

***

When the people, the simple people,
The ones who complete, each day from the biginning
The jig-sow of living,
When they weave the struggle together,
They are a human net, a big net, the biggest.
They can stop all the machines of living:
The wheat, the yellow gold, the whistle of the trains, the deep rivers of black gold.
No one can make them small again.
These people, the simple people, don't know how immense they are
With the machines of life in their hands,
Even the jug of water that they shared and that shared them
Was strong in their hands.

***

We are not born once.
We are born each day more,
And we learn, each day deeper.
We learn.
We learn that the people are everywhere.
In the fear of trust, in the trust,
In the guilt that is innocent.
And we learn
That the cross-roads are everywhere,
We choose all the time.
And we learn that even the flicker of death inside us
Teaches us something.

***

It is not easy to describe the journey,
Because each step is another journey, another cross-road,
And with each step everything changes,
Because time changes, because we are different,
Because we chose each time, in each step.
The view, the seasons of the world, the seasons of people,
Everything wanders somewhere else.
After all, the journey is the big nomad in our life. The biggest.

***

THE DEMONSTRATION OF THE FIRST OF MAY
The people walked silent.
Only the placards spoke.
The simple people don't know how strong words can be.
They need someone who knows words are power,
Someone who knows how to use the power
In order to speak. To speak inside the silence of the people, inside their pain,
And the words will be immense. As immense as the eyes of hunger:
The eyes bigger than the face, bigger than life.
These eyes will not be silent. They'll have the power to speak.
They'll be a big shout. The biggest.

***

The market of humans, the market of sweat.
We should think about them without rage, without sadness.
We should realize we cannot change even one law of nature,
But we can change the laws of men.
And yet, we need a clear river in our head,
Because rivers know always the way to the sea,
Because our thirst should see.

***

ABOUT MEASURING
You look for small things inside the big ones,
And you forget that big things can hide easily inside the small ones:
The ten fingers of hunger in the mouth of a child, a cry inside a whisper.
You measure the flow of light,
You forget that light is a waterfall of suns, there are not enough number for light.
And you never measure the speed of the dark, of the dark inside the dark.
And you use too much the compass,
You don't realize that a motion can reveal the four masks of the wind.

***

THE TOMBSTONE OF GORKY
Here lies the teacher of the people,
The teacher who was taught by the people.
The people know what the past knows, they know the laws of a seed.
He was as small, as immense as a child in pain.
He was a citizen of the crowd,
The big crowd that made him big,
So, his gaze was always at the height of a human.

***

THE THOUGHTS OF THE CLASSIC PHILOSOPHERS
In the theatre, the audience is arrogant: the classical thinkers.
They know they are inevitable, so that the play will exist.
On the stage, the hunger is timeless, and the lives that are tired,
They seem vulnerable, too exhausted to speak.
They don't know they are actors in a theatre that is not their own,
A theatre of shadows,
That without them the theatre wouldn't exist.
Maybe, one day, they'll realize they are not shadows,
That their motions of living are alive. That the motions of living are power.
That they can write something different,
That the only theatre, the only play, the only audience will be life.
It will be human.
There will be no theatre of shadows. Nowhere.

***

On the stage: the play.
Down: the audience. Us.
The play changes us. Seeing is power.
But we don't realize how much the play needs us.
How we change it, how we give it strength.
How much we let it change us,
We see, we feel, we walk out, and we are never the same.

***

We believe
That no one can steal the truth.
The world is truth. No one can steal the world.
But we forget the words.
We forget that words are power, that they can play their own truth
In all the theatres that exist.
So, words may be the big thieves of truth. The biggest.

***

We should know whom to believe.
We should believe in those who are close. Who can touch who we are.
The farmers in the fields of bread that are not his.
The soldier in a war that is not his.
The thirsty in a desert that is not theirs.
We should believe in them, even when they don't believe in us.
One day they'll believe.
One day there will be a struggle, and the struggle will be theirs.
One day, they'll own the most beautiful thing a man can have: life.

***

You should be able to come,
Like someone coming inside a big crowd.
You should write words
Coming from a big crowd.
Your motions of living should come, like motions coming from the big crowd.
You don't know how big you are
When you enter something big. The biggest. The big crowd.

***

We lost the battle,
But we didn't lose the war.
The real war didn't begin yet.
We lost the battle,
But we didn't lose our name, the address where we live, we love, we hurt.
In a corner of our address, the hunger eats the hunger.
Remembering our address is a power. A hungry address is a power.

***

THE WAR IN GERMANY
Wars are harsh mothers. The empty nipple. The nipple of hunger.
Money becomes paper,
And bread- something rare. A soft diamond.
We keep our hunger, like silent hands, in our pockets.
Among the nice people hunger is suspicious,
A crime against all good etiquette.
We hide it behind our good manners.
We look at the food stores, quiet, polite,
But the politeness is wild. A cry in the cage of our mouth.
Cages are a wild place.

***

They say that whoever fights,
Should know how to lose.
They don't know that fighting for truth has always truth in it,
That even if you lose today,
You may not lose tomorrow,
Because truth is hungry, it eats the hunger with the people,
Because a hungry truth is a big power,
And it forgets nothing.

***

Maybe you walk towards me, always more,
Because of my words,
But words are not enough,
And I have more beautiful words.
You need your own words,
After all, words are the photo of the person in your head.
You need your own person,
You need what that person thinks, what he knows.
You need it in order to walk towards me,
To walk with the person in your head,
Always more, always deeper.

***

THE COURT IN GERMANY
The worker in court
Reads Marx, and more than that,
His son died of hunger.
He was sent to prison for a double crime.
He was guilty
They don't know that the person in his head is free,
That Marx will read his thoughts, he will cry for his son,
In the most distant prison.

***

The hunger is everywhere, secret, clear,
And yet, there are those who don't fight in the war of the bread.
They don't realize that a defeated bread will defeat them.
They don't realize that the people weave the struggle
With the motions of living: the most powerful thread,
That it will be the only safety net they'll ever have.
The immense net.

***

NAZI GERMANY
We denounce people who are too silent.
Silence is suspicious. Among the big shouts, it is treason.
We do our duty to the strong men of Germany, the super-men.
The ones who allow us to die in war, glorious, nameless,
Who allow us to feel the ten fingers of hunger in our mouth.
It is not easy to be a patriot.
But duty is duty.

***

NAZI GERMANY
We are teachers, we should teach,
But we don't know who will teach us.
And it is sad
That we let the guilty teach us the art of guilt,
That the merchants of hunger teach us the paradise of hunger.
It is sad
That we feel no longer the pain.

***

NAZI GERMANY
There will be an interrogation.
No one knows why, who, when.
Fear is everywhere,
And this fear makes you, naturally, unnoticed,
Guilty of something you don't know.
Your fear defeats you. You are guilty.
Innocence is dead.

***

The war weaves a safety net of tasks for everybody.
The workers sell their sweat in the factories of death,
And others will sell their life to a bullet.
But after the war,
There will be nothing left to sell,
Except the money that is paper,
And the hunger that eats paper.
The safety net is torn.

***

THE MARKET AFTER THE WAR
We saw the cafes, the taverns of hunger,
We saw those who have lost their face,
And yet, some had gentle wrinkles, an honest tear,
As if something remained indelible.
And it was strange,
Those who were broken by fear,
Had something strong in them,
Something like those who didn't break.
Humans may be as strong as their fear. As immense.

***


We write a letter to a soldier.
We ask questions: the empty bread, the fatigue that is heavy.
We don't realize it, but we question ourselves,
The question we fear asking.
We ask our empty bread, our heavy fatigue.
We ask how long can a silence resist,
How long a cry that doesn't dare crying. It will break us.
But in war questions are the only answer possible.

***

In the middle of the grey plague: the war,
There hangs a red cloth
In one of the factories of death.
Squads come, their iron face, metal in the eyes,
And they realize it was painted in blood,
A worker, nothing more.
They don't know that blood is the biggest rebel,
That it bleeds for life, that it bleeds for the life that bleeds.

***

EMANIS
Pure as a white sheet The nuptial sheet is empty.
You are interrogated.
The interrogator does what interrogators do.
He accuses you of speaking to the people in an impure language:
Hungry words.
But you don't answer.
Inside you, you continue to speak to the people.
You know that some words are power.
You know that time is power.
You know that your time is not enough.

***

Life is a threat, your people are threatened.
You have two choices, two powers:
To see or not to see.
You have the choice to see,
To struggle the way one struggles for the most beautiful thing:
Life. To die at some wall of pain, in some last bullet.
You have two choices: not to see.
To fear and to die inside yourself a thousand times.
After all, you are human, and regret is a killer. Pitiless.

***

We have to study, always.
Even the empires of money need persons who think,
Who know where to find new markets of gold: the human flesh.
How to create their own paradise, beautiful as sin.
Maybe, one day, they'll have to study the time flowing through them, through their gold,
Like water inside water.
They'll study the laws of change.
Empires collapsing, money becomes paper,
And the markets of human flesh are bankrupt,
Humans are expensive, a living diamond. No one can afford something priceless.
Paradise is bankrupt.

***

THE DEATH OF A COMANION
The morning was like any other morning: lit shadows.
The wall was like any other wall. It protects you from nothing.
The bullet was like any other bullet. It was innocent.
And the man that shot was like all the other men.
His fear was fearsome.
One day, he may be innocent, but now, he is not.
He is guilty.
Maybe he used to think he understood people, guilt, innocence.
But now he understands nothing, and the fear understands him.

***

We have newspapers, magazines.
Newspapers are power, they tell us what to think.
They are ready for anything, for any plot.
Maybe the fear of truth is bigger than what we imagine.
Maybe they fear people who think.
Thinking is a crime, punishable by a bullet.
Maybe, one day, they'll disappear, like the dinosaurs.
The ice age will end.
All that will be left will be the naked bones: they will be paper,
Huge, ancient,
An immense tombstone of words.
And there will be humans,
They can write their own newspaper.
They know what a human knows :how to think.

***

VLASOVA, a woman, a friend.
And yet, there are many Vlasovas.
Small rodents who can break walls.
Small lionesses of the small days of people.
Their roar is so deep, that it seems silent,
It is so deep, that it is loud, immense.
It hunts the hunters . It forgets nothing,
The ones who skin the priceless skins of human rodents, of human lionesses.
They put a tag of price on the priceless.
They sell them in all the markets of the world.
Small women in their small kitchens of hunger.

***

Wars kill the sons of women,
But, there is something, something that protects them from themselves.
The son remains inside them. An ally.
He is inside them as if he was not yet born.
He is inside them as if he grew, a day, in their day, a year in their year.
They are his age, young, eternal.
They think the same thoughts,
They sing the same songs.
They share their silence.
They seem peaceful,
But some nights they cry like the old,
Small tears, too tired to go anywhere.

***

The raid on the neighborhood.
It is easy to hide big things in small ones:
The infinite hunger in a few huts, a few ruins.
They put some men down.
Maybe rebels, maybe somewhere beneath the hunger, the big killer,
They were ready for another killer, the bullet.
They asked for the last wish,
And one of them said:
Move away, you cover my view,
A grey hole in the light.
The bullet that found his life was a grey hole in the light.

***

An unknown soldier, a rebel, died.
He died nameless.
We remember only the names of the ones who defeat,
Those whose human, lost, forgotten, is defeated, always more, always deeper.
He was too young to die,
At times, rebels are older than their age.
They killed him like an animal, with a knife in his cry.
His last word was the blood in his mouth.
A big word. The biggest.

***

You know little, you are too tired,
Too tired to think.
Yet, you should recognize those who sell your hunger,
Who buy your wheat for less than nothing.
The wheat is money. The make it paper.
You don't have enough paper to eat.
You don't know how immense you are
When you recognize it,
When you tear the paper,
When you feel how much the paper needs you.

***

You know so little.
You work too much. The merchants of hunger are harsh.
You are too tired to think, to read.
You had so little choice.
Hunger is a big thief. The biggest.
It stole the books you never had,
Long before you knew how to read.
It stole the thought you never had,
Long before you knew how to think.
Remember, there is always a choice.
No one can steal the person in your head,
Except you.

***

A hole in the cloths, fifth hand shoes,
Are not indispensable for a rebel.
But he needs, absolutely, the person in his head,
The person who thinks, who is free,
A person who forgets nothing:
The people, the work that is too tired to sweat,
The hands that are too tired to cry.
And he knows how to rebel without rage.
Rage blinds us, and the rebel has to see,
Clear, lucid, absolute.

***

THE REVOLUTION OF THE ASPHALT
They build you, black sister,
Long, wide, exquisite.
Thousands of people created you, the artists of roads.
Thousands of people will measure you, barefoot or with shoes,
Always more.
Black sister, rebel sister,
One day, those who made you, will own you,
And you will own them,
The way an artist owns his art, the way it owns him.

***

Beauty is beautiful
When matters gallops in it on the hundred hoofs of a gazelle,
When the motions of living follows the river of time, they go far.
When the fish of time, the sliding minutes, have the invisible beauty of the indispensable,.
Beauty weaves the motion of matter, the motion of time in one cloth.
It is exquisite.

***

I fled from my homeland.
The barbed wires tore my blood.
I learned, always more, always deeper
That the only homeland are the people.
So, I can be hungry everywhere,
I can feel pain everywhere,
And I can love everywhere.

***

In order to flee
You have to know the art of escape.
To leave nothing behind,
What you think, who you are.
To carry everything along.
You can escape the homeland, the fury of a line on the map.
You can escape to the homeland without limits: the people.
You'll bring with you a big gift, the biggest:
What you think, who you are, What you love.

EXILE
The exiles keep what they remember in their pockets,
Close, very close.
They feel they don't own the present,
But, they have the past, a home. A deep home.
The only passport they have is the passport to dream.
Some travel to the dreams of a poet,
And some, to the dream of a human. The big dream.
Some dream a passport to the future,
They dream a dawn that will be for everybody,
And there will be no exile, because there will be no lines on the map,
The raging lines.

***

There are humans who open their shed
For the homeless, for those whose life is cold.
These humans cannot change the laws of the weather, the ice in the shoes,
But, for one night, they change the weather beneath the naked bodies.
We should remember,
Change is power,
And we need power, enough power, to change.

***

It is not easy to be you, woman.
To cook your sweat,
To satisfy what cannot be satisfied: the soup of hunger.
To paint spring on your face,
When you feel the winter deep, very deep.
When it is too late for the body of love, the raining touch.
When you pretend it is thirsty.
And you have no way out. Even god is not a woman.

***

We shouldn't sell our hands again
For a plate of soup.
We shouldn't sell our life, for anything.
We should hold our hands, our missing hands, in our arms.
The longing for your hands is power.
It is time to take our hands back, to take our life back,
Before it is too late.
It's midnight.
The last moment before dawn.

***

We have to learn how to own our life,
To learn the simple things, which are never really simple:
The alphabet of faces, of people, of a struggle.
We have to study wherever we are,
Even in prison.
The person in our head has a choice, he can be free,
He can learn the laws of nature from the pulse of a star in his pulse.
He can learn that the true prison is fear:
The bars in our eyes.

***

So much modern around us.
The market of humans, renewed deep, till the flesh.
The black magic, that turns everything, even love, into paper.
The cruel clown who sells and buys us for a toy.
The people who eat their hunger. Hunger is a prison:
Modern bars in their empty gaze.
We should know more than we know anything else:
That this modern will end,
That there will be another kind of modern.
It will be human.
It will be as free as bound as life, as love.
It will be, like dawn, like the most distant star, for everybody.

***

One person has only two eyes.
He sees only one dream.
He knows only one time.
But when we are a thousand or more,
We have two thousand eyes,
We have a thousand dreams.
We know what time it is in the world.
Seeing is a power.

***

When people struggle each in the struggle of the other,
They think alone, and inside the head of the other,
They hurt alone, and inside the pain of the others,
And they should walk footprint in footprint.
It's true, the shortest way is the best one,
But someone has to know it.
After all, men made their journey to human,
Hesitating, unsure, the footprints rained a rainbow of directions,
Because no one knew the shortest way,
Or maybe it doesn't exist.

***

We are the refugees of hunger, of pain.
We don't know that the refugees of hunger,
Will eat hunger, and the hunger will eat them.
That we'll be left on the peaks of suffering.
The peaks are cold. The peaks are lonely. The vultures are hot.
We don't realize that we carry inside us ourselves:
The fear to fight the laws of hunger, of pain, in our own city.
If we don't fight them here, we'll fight them nowhere.

***

Spring is the song of growth without limits, endless.
The trees, the grasses, the herbs.
The bodies of love, love without limits.
And hands touch each other, in order to feel what they say,
Deeper, without limits.
In the lips, bread grows, small suns, without limits.
The spring of humans may last longer, much longer than the spring.
The most exquisite fruit.

***

We gather from dark alleys . Hunger grows in the dark.
We come to the big match.
It is important.
We've learned how to win the battle for independence,
But this match is different.
We'll learn something indispensable:
How to fight with other men, the team of the big hunger merchants,
The ball is human skin.
We'll learn how to win.
We'll win because loosing costs too much.
We cannot afford it.

***

We fear change. Change may be an ambush, a mine field in the future.
Change is power.
And yet, there are things that cannot be changed,
And we fear them more than change.

***

Everything flows into something else.
Everything is matter, and matter is the magician of change.
So, the merchants of human, ready for a thousand years of sale,
May become something different: merchandise, human.
And the people sold in all the markets of the world
May become merchants without limits, human without limits.
And nothing is forever.

***

It is not easy to be invisible.
To weave a transparent safety net for the people.
To see them, to see them deeply, your eyes hidden in what you see.
To speak to them. Your words naked as glass. Your mouth hidden in what it says.
To struggle in the small battles that are never really small,
Invisible, silent, nameless.
To die. To hide your death.

***

There is water beneath the silence of the poor,
If you know how to listen.
The silence is a dam. Water is chained in the silence.
But it will collapse with the waterfall of time,
With the waterfall in the shout of people.
The waterfall will come today, tomorrow.
It will be thirsty.

***

You call the people to strike in your strike.
After all, when you help others, you help yourself.
Life became a tired acrobat on a tight rope,
Without a net of safety.
It leaves you no choice.
You act. Thinking is an act. Living is an act.
And the struggle is an act. A tight rope without a safety net.
It is too late for waiting.
It is too late for the gods.

***

It is a long time we didn't hear from you.
You, with the motions of shadows in your words.
We hear you now,
We hear in your gaze, in your silence,
The power to learn.
As if you went far in a journey to clarity,
As if you left the shadows where they belong:
The twilight. The shadows mingled with light. A truce.
As if this truce had small infinites it its eyes. It knew who you were, who you are.

***

When you are poor,
The roads roll down, like a stone in an abyss.
The work, the daily life are heavy, heavier than gravity,
They curve space.
Yet, somewhere, you meet people, people like you.
The same pain of living, like you. The same pain of gravity, like you.
People are power. The sum of lives is power.
Power enough to use the stone in their abyss, the stones in their gravity,
To build another road.
And these stones, these human stone, this road
Will roll up.

***

Wash your face.
Open your eyes under the water. Wash your eyes.
Try to grasp time in the water,
To catch the fish of time: the moments.
Your morning will be lucid.
The time-washed eyes will see
What time it is in your life. What time it is in the world.

***

NEW YORK

The Gulliver, the true Gulliver.
It makes the people feel smaller than what they are. Noisy dwarfs.
An endless pot that lets in everybody. It cooks him. It makes him something else.
The strangers may become a hamburger of gold, a hot dog of hunger.
A garden of rare human specimen. Staring is free.
The men have large backs because of fashion,
And we don't know how big, how small they are inside these backs.
The mammoth buildings. They don't know that the mammoth lasted longer,
Much longer than themselves.
And the pyramid building.
They don't realize that the pyramids were cemeteries of mummified life.
We want our motions to be slower, slow as a city rising from the sea,
But, it's useless. We cannot slow time in a city.
And the people, the robots, the factories cannot stop.
Stopping is death.
What an eternity. What an eternity that was too fast to last.
THE CRACK
The crack was a journey to the nothing. The fastest journey
As fast as the speed of the dark.
The bridges that were left united nothing. They measured the distances
Between men. Bankropsy is lonely .
There was the mysterious law of sales. You fire men. You sell them to the nothing,
And yet, you have an open account with life.
But bankropsy is a law, not a mystery.
The men with the large backs filled up the alleys,
But who will fill the alley when night comes, what loneliness.
Love is bankrupt.
And everywhere, the bankropsy of life.
Life is cheap. It is worth almost nothing.
They say that the ones sleeping on the benches in the park
Have strange thoughts. Inacceptable. Illogical.
So, maybe something is not bankrupt.

***

We should learn how and from whom to protect ourselves.
We should know that only the living have the right to protect themselves.
We should be alive.
Living is an act of faith, a struggle. It is power.
We should know that the years in which we were dead, silent, immobile, and only the hunger was alive
Can protect nothing.
The living who protect themselves from the violent hunger, from the violent wall where they shoot hunger.
This act, as natural as magic, as a breath, should be legal.

***

You are tied to your bed. The violent consumption.
Yet, you can fight from your bed.
You can show your face, the huge eyes of hunger, your bones full of rain.
You should tell them no one is innocent.
We are, each one, responsible for everything, for whatever happens.
We are mothers, we are a mother land without limits.
You should fight from the arena of your bed, from the arena of a human.
You should fight, thumb up.
And you should love life enough to die in the arena of shadows,
In your hands a rain drop. It glows.

***

GERMANY: THE CANNONS ARE MORE NECCESARY THAN BUTTER
Maybe the saying is true.
The less butter exists, the more wars,
The more enemies among the people: the rebels of butter.
So, they die at the wall, or they die of hunger,
The hunger for the butter the forgot,
And yet, somewhere deep in their tongue, they remember.

***

THE POEMSOF SVENDBORK
Someone writes poems for rebels.
He uses pieces of the past, yellow words,
And he sees visions:
He sees the waves, the immense leaves of the sea.
He sees the leaves: people.
He sees the cycles inside a leaf, the orbits of the world inside a leaf.
Orbits are infinite. Orbits are power.
The orbits walk always more towards you, always deeper. It's time.

***

The Babylonian languages
Are the language of people in decay,
A foreign language of a life that became foreign.
It may tell us that hunger is a cureless disease,
That the refugees are tourists in the world.
They may tell the ones who rage
That there is one wall, one bullet to each rage.
Maybe we cannot even speak to the tomorrow.
It may not understand the alpha bet of decay,
Why the hunger, why the rage, why the walls.
Maybe they will be far, much further in the journey to human.
Maybe they will use the alpha bet of nature, the orbits around life.

***


We camp around the beach.
Thousand people with thousand hungers, with a thousand pains.
The rulers are strong, as strong as their fear,
Only the guns feel nothing.
The smoke rises calm from the roofs of the city.
The smoke rises from the guns, it finds our lives, one by one.
The problems of hunger, of pain were solved.
Yet, the fear of the ones who shot goes far,
Further than fear.

***

Someone died. A coal worker, the breath of trains,
And his friends, the people of coal, the black breath of trains,
Throw each night a bag of coal to the woman.
Love is matter, so it has many shapes,
A gaze, a touch, a bag of coal.
Memory is matter, so it is infinite.
People still sing the coal, with smoke in their breath.

***

THE POEM FOR THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER
The unknown soldier is a symbol of war.
But it is also the people, the flesh, the eyes,
All the people who believed that the Patria is holy,
That killing for the Patria is holy.
One day we may kill this soldier,
We'll melt the iron in his face, the steal in his body,
We' make it something as invisible as the useful, as naked as the useful.
There is no justice for the dead,
But there is justice for the living.
There is no Patria for the dead,
But there is a Patria for the living: the people.

***

We killed the unknown soldier.
He was alive once,
Until he was a symbol. An iron symbol of iron wars. He rusted
We lived, we know the habits of tears for the dead,
For the dead stone over them.
There is no after life. Killing is forever.
And new dreams are only for the living.
We killed the unknown soldier,
But we still remember the cries of the iron in his face, the metal in his eyes
Remembering is only for the living, and the sadness.

***

We are primitive and modern at the same time,
Because the past is full of future.
We are modern.
The seas, the immense seas are a puddle.
We travel to all the continents of life,
Our luggage: full of failures, full of gains.
We fight against the primitive,
Ancient people from the ancient continents, hungry legends,
So we fight against ourselves, the primitive inside us.
But nothing is simple.
We fight also the gods, the gods that were born in caves of fear.
Maybe, one day,
Under the microscope we'll find no god,
There will be a living tissue of light and shadow. A truce.
Maybe, one day, we'll defeat the most primitive gods, the most modern:
The hunger, the cruel hunger.

***

We made great discoveries:
New continents, new seas, the time inside a wave,
We studied the planets, the speed of light.
But we didn't learn the most important things:
The speed of the dark in the air, in a human.
And we didn't find a cure for the dark inside the dark:
The hunger.
So hunger remain incurable. A black hole, infinite.

***

We cannot change even one law of nature,
But we can accept its laws:
Everything is matter: the world, us.
Everything is change, matter is the magician of change.
The first chaos gave matter eternity,
So we can own something of it,
But we have to learn how to use the infinite.
How to live, to die, to love, more eternal.
And we have to know who is eternal inside us,
Who is the seed of a human, the Seed of Seeds.

***

We prefer the new over the old,
And we forget that everything is full of past,
And the past is full of future,
That the past brought us here, to the new:
The new continents of life, the new words,
The new machines where bread grows, ready, warm,
And to the new factories:
A new circus, a terrible circus where people are tired acrobats.
They work on a tight rope without a net of safety, without a net of mercy.
Maybe we need an earthquake of people,
To discover among the rabble something new, something amazing.
To find the free person in our head, to see him clear, close, as close as a thought.
To find the human inside us, always more, always better,
The only safety net possible.
To close the cruel circus. To know it was an arena, not a circus. It was always thumb down.

***

Someone wrote on the wall of shooting:
Live Marx!
The colors were bright, almost invisible,
But little by little, the gunpowder inside the shot ones,
The cruel, the innocent gun powder,
Made them darker, deeper, as if they carved the wall.
Maybe, one day, these words will throw down the wall.
Dreamers are power,
They may be an earthquake in the walls, the tall graves.

***

There re people, as big as their hunger.
The cold shivers inside them
And yet, they want to honor March, the ice in the hours.
They didn't forget that beauty exists.
They order his statue,
There is someone who collects the coins, a man from everyday,
And he gives them the statue, pure wood, piece by piece,
To burn the cold, to burn the shiver.
Maybe this is the biggest honor, the most beautiful,
A song to matter, the warm statue, the warm wood.

***

Revolutions are not a simple affair.
The people are suspicious. Fear is suspicious.
The trust no one, because they were betrayed once too much.
They don't trust words, the big betrayer.
But, somewhere in a shed, a secret rebel,
Lets the people in, to heat their shiver, to cool their thirst.
He was silent, he said nothing,
But the people understood.
Maybe the small things: a shed, the warmth in a silence, are big.
Maybe they let people be big, bigger than their fear.
Maybe they let the people understand that they can jump from the tall fear,
That they are their own net of safety, net of mercy.
The revolution began.

***

The old rebel sang the International at the walls, at war,
A moment before death, or even a moment after.
But everything is matter, so everything changes,
Also the habits of fear.
The simple people sing it now, clear, visible,
Because they don't eat their hunger, they don't drink their thirst,
Because work is a net of safety over the abyss.
They sing, because they don't sing alone.

***

Our habits of mistrust don't begin with the crime, or theatre plays.
The begin inside us. We don't trust ourselves.
We learn how to fear ourselves, to fear the others, to fear life.
Maybe, one day, we'll learn how to trust again.
How to trust our feet, our eyes,
How to walk towards the human, always more, always closer.
When you know how to be close, you know how to trust.
How to begin the journey, each day, from the beginning. How to trust it.
How to shape the road, how to let the road shape our footprints, always deeper,
How to trust it.
One day, we'll learn whom to mistrust.
We'll recognize the waves that drown us, even though they are not thirsty.
They are innocent.
We'll recognize the pirate ship, the big slave trader who drowned us once too much,
Who drowned innocence once too much.
We'll know they are thirsty always.

***

Everything became expensive: the earth, the bread.
Only the hunger is cheap, and life, and men.
Some eat expensive dreams and cheap humans.
They eat too much.
They need all the pleasures of the world.
They say, after all, some can eat pleasure, and some: the hunger.
We spoke too much, with a soft tongue, as soft as a whisper.
But one day we'll come with hard moons in our mouth,
With rust in our lips,
And with all the hungers, the stones of hunger in our teeth.
Stones forget nothing.
The hunger forgives nothing.

***

GERMANY
Your vulture wings flew low. They devoured the dead.
And the vultures above: your gods, were scavengers of hells, of the burning shoes of a child.
You mummified people in the pyramids of Auschwitz.
You mummified people in the pyramids of hate.
And yet, nothing was holy,
Not even the mummified hunger, the mummified life,
The mummified cry of a human.
The infinite was mummified in that cry.

***

AFTER THE WAR
There were men who lost themselves from sight.
They forgot their name, but the regret remembered.
They forgot what they couldn't forget, the exile from the journey of humans,
T hey were nomads in their life, nomads in fear.
Often they hid inside the night, the dark catacombs,
And the dark stole their eyes. Their cry was blind.
They had to die in order to make room for the future.
The simple people were different.
They knew how to step in a journey that began again from the beginning,
Each day. They walked towards themselves.
People with suns in their sperm,
With a quiet twilight of someone who knew the habits of the world,
The habits of living. The sad habits of happiness.

***

Spring
We tighten the strings of the guitar.
We loosen the strings of the song.
The song grows without limits, like pleasure.
The song travels like pollen,
Because time passes through them both, like the tracks of a train.
The song is in the station, and yet it is on the train.
It leaves to somewhere else. It stays.

***

I loved once a woman.
I was the one who beat her, and said: I love you.
I was the one who chased her out,
And loved the smell of grass in her hair.
All that's left is the small cry when she realized she was alone for so long.
When she realized she didn't know how to be loved,
Or was too afraid to choose. Fear is a killer.
I am the one who sees her, at times, her face, sand in a Mongolian desert.
I think she whispers she had no choice,
She was thirsty.

***

The afternoon was beautiful with you.
I never loved you so much.
And yet, I had to leave.
Maybe I was afraid of so much beauty, of so much closeness.
Beauty is power, closeness is power,
And I didn't know if I am strong enough.
Behind me, faces erase themselves, like sand.
All that's left is a mummy of beauty, mummy of closeness
In the deepest pyramid.
I am thirsty.

***

WE ARE GOING TO BENARES
The city has no exotic bars,
No Raki to drink, no Raki to drink us.
The fogs have no morning,
The people have nothing left to sell,
They sold their hands, their sweat, their life long ago,
And there is no one who needs souls.
Our old planet wasn't born round.
It curves because there are too many people,
They are heavier than gravity.
And the earth, the solid earth, the safe earth trembles in Benares,
It kills Benares, tremble by tremble.
A city dies
Handless, without morning, with no room for one man more, without safe earth.
Poor. Beautiful.

***

A COMPANION ILL WIT TBC

You are a rebel against hunger.
You know that TBC is a bullet shot at the hungry.
It is a bullet shot at the hungry wall.
You should fight the way a rebel fights:
Up to the last hunger, Up to the last wall.
And you should love life so much,
Enough to live for it.

***
I remember little.
I was missing for long from her hair: the soft shadows.
I remember something of the smell of grass between her thighs,
Of the soft marble of her breasts.
Maybe, we lose the closeness
Because we don't read the people,
We don't decipher the alpha bet of their face.
Everything is power: the reading, the closeness.
We need power to live it.
There is a cross roads everywhere, in the reading, in the closeness.
We have to choose. Always.

***

We hear sounds. They say something.
Smelly words, killer words.
We don't know, we suspect they say us.
We become, each day, one day more harsh.
Each day, one day more alone.
We don't realize that when we protect ourselves from life,
Life protects itself from us.

***

Some men build a home, a small roof over the big hunger,
And they protect it with hungry teeth,
But nothing is enough to feel safe.
They are suspicious. Fear is suspicious, always.
They believe that no one is close enough,
That even a friend could steal their home.
And it is sad,
They don't know that the only one who will betray them
Will be the hunger.
They'll have to sell the walls, to sell the holes in the roof,
They'll have to sell the window with their faces in it.

***

Some nights, you dream you are bankrupt.
Now days, when you are bankrupt, you lose everything.
Of course, the friends, the wife, the furniture leave.
And you are someone else who came to stay here.
He uses your face in the window, as if nothing happened,
As if a man wasn't convicted to lose everything,
Even the human in his head. He learned how to bow.

***

We came from very far,
From the places where survival was a way of life.
We came from very far,
And we carried the whole gravity with us:
We survive in order to live.
After all, the meaning of life is survival.
The ones who harvested nature, became rich,
Because they harvested men. Men are nature too.
And the infinite isolation of people
Made hatred impossible, made love impossible.
And they harvest, each day from the beginning.
They sell people in all shapes:
The bread, the clothes, the jug of water. It is empty.

***

They rule us:
The lawyers, the new priests, the army, the bankers.
They gathers laws that are bullets, and the paper that is money,
And the prisons that are iron. They gather fear.
Maybe they don't know how strong can a man be.
A human who is free in his silence,
A human who is free in his hunger.
This human is power.
Maybe, one day, they'll realize
That nothing is enough to silence the silence of a human.
It is free.
It is hungry, and this hunger is a big power. The biggest

***

We have to learn the alphabet of people,
How to read what we see, how to understand what we see,
How to read what we don't see.
One day we'll learn how to do things differently:
We'll learn the alphabet of change,
How it writes the world, how it writes us.
After all, no one crosses the night and come out the same,
With the same alphabet in his face
Change is power, and we need power to use it.
To walk towards life, each moment more, each moment deeper.

***

A country invades another. Rulers are hungry, always.
The soldiers : workers. They are hungry in another way.
And the war sows its own seeds of hunger inside them.
They don't know they'll win their war,
When they'll lose the war.

***

In war, love is different.
The embrace is a battle field between tenderness and fear.
The night is a mine field of silences.
The patient source of the ages is not patient anymore.
Everything is more final,
Everything is made of full-stops, even a gaze.
And the animal of pain curls in a caress of the night.

***

It is the century of the masks.
There are those who camouflage the past in a new uniform.
The great invalids use new crutches. Sharp, shining metal.
The old promises wear new slogans,
And the old laws wear new prisons.
Only the hunger is the same old hunger, an incurable disease.
And only some eyes see the visible:
The miracles of two pasts, the old and the new,
Rolling, like a stone of time, into the same abyss.

***

We hit people when they hurt.
We hit people when we hurt,
And we don't know which hitting hurts us more.

***

There is so much suffering,
That suffering seems normal.
They say suffering hardens us: a shell. It makes us stronger.
They don't know that the shell is fragile,
That we have to make it, each day from the beginning,
Each day bigger, each day deeper,
That carrying the huge shell is another kind of suffering.
Maybe we wouldn't be able to endure hope. Hope is another kind of future.
Maybe we wouldn't be able to endure more future.
Maybe hope needs training.
It needs a pass-word we forgot for too long.
A pass-word to the power of a man in pain.

***

FOR THE DEATH OF LENIN
When a good man is dying,
We should remind him
That he made the journey to human, the immense journey,
Alone in his body, and together with crowd, the big crowd, the good crowd.
That death is another journey into the world, always further, always closer.
When a good man is dying,
We realize he was a secret river of time.
As endless. As inexplicable.

***

TO LENIN
Whenever everything was silence, he spoke.
He called things with their birth name.
Birth names have power.
The rebellion followed him, like the old shoes of a man, wherever he was.
Yet, his death was not a rebel,
It was a law of the world.
A rebel can change the laws of men,
But he cannot change even a comma in the laws of the world.

***

The rain hangs over us, heavy,
Nature continues to do what it should do.
It blossoms, it withers.
It doesn't know that there will be war,
It doesn't know that the human nature obeys other laws.
It brings springs, autumns, natural as magic.
It rains over us the laws of nature, natural as magic,
Absolute as the rain.
Above the laws of nature there are only the laws of nature.

***

Someone steals fruits from our garden.
Someone brings his first hand hunger, his fifth hand shoes.
We don't mind.
Maybe it was a quiet dawn and we felt cleansed,
Or maybe, we feel suddenly, inside us, the first men,
The fruit gatherers,
Eating the fruits of the world.

***

It is not a good time for the youth.
They don't know whom to believe:
What their books say, what their eyes say.
Books have power. Whatever is written seems truth.
They don't realize that seeing is a big power. The biggest,
If you know how to see, if you understand what you see,
If the circle in the center of seeing can touch the small infinites of the world.
Circles are infinite, and small infinites are infinite.
These circles seem strong, much stronger than only two eyes.
They are a compass . The needle is north.

***

You are a simple man. You go to war.
Remember,
The defeat of the rulers is not your defeat,
It is your victory,
Because the only war that matters
Is the war of the bread,
And the rulers are the enemies of the bread.

***

FOR GERMANY
You: beautiful forests of Germany. You: the earth, the cities, the rivers.
You are a law of nature, so, you stay.
You: beautiful cities of Germany. The people who make the bread- bread.
You are a law of human, a gentle law of human.
You can stay.
You: beautiful Germany, remain beautiful,
But remember, the ones who can stay in the gentle laws, make you beautiful.

***

There are steps that make the road rewind.
There are steps that carry warm seasons in their shoes.
They sow warmth, they sow hope.
Seeds are hope.
It is the big journey of the seeds, from the beginning.

***

You are madly in love.
You don't mind if you are loved,
You don't think about right and wrong.
Madness can be freedom, madness can be prison,
And it doesn't let you choose.

***
Theatres are factories of dreams, of feelings, big drug salesmen, smugglers of borders.
And you, an actor,
You fell that life is placed in the wrong place of reality.
You forget that in the wrong place of reality,
Big acting happens. The biggest.
The sowing ones who sow life,
The workers who sow their deepest hands,
The things that a human measures, and they measure him.
These people need other plays.
Plays as strong as the asphalt they till, the black sister, each day, from the beginning,
And that till them.
Plays as strong as the rage of a seed.

***

Acting is a sad profession.
A clown in a circus. He is the magician of feelings.
He makes people laugh at pain,
At the loneliness of a small man in a big arena.
They laugh with numb lips, the lips that fear to feel too much.
They enter the theatre two by two,
Because they are afraid to be alone
With the clown, with what he really feels.

***

You are an actor.
Whatever you play should seem that it happened now,
Only once.
And yet, it is something that happened to you again and again,
Like the motions of living.
And you shouldn't forget the before and the after:
The river of time flowing in the play,
And whatever flows out of the play, out of the stage.
It makes the now immense, naked.
And you should make the people feel the now, the before, the after
Wherever they go:
The river of time, the river of matter, the magician of change.
Remember: they are thirsty.

***

THE JOY OF THINGS THAT HAPPEN
You forget how to live.
You forget that each footprint is a new journey.
It begins each time, from the beginning,
That each footprint is a new cross-road.
You have to choose:
To live like someone who's dying, to live like someone who is alive.
To do whatever you do as if it were a seed,
The beginning of something.
To know life is hard work, and yet to love it.
To know life is the most beautiful thing we'll ever have.
You don't realize how immense you are when you know it.

***

Rage is important.
The rage of a soldier may shatter a war.
The rage of someone who teaches, may shatter, the now, the after.
And in a play, it may remind the actor how to let the rage play on the stage,
In the people.
And yet, when we struggle, there should be clear water in the center of seeing.
The rage may blind the clarity. Blind the water.

***

You died, small teacher,
And I don't know how to teach myself.
How to sit in the class of the days, of the hours,
How to understand their tongue.
How to remember
That the journey from hour to hour, begins each hour, from the beginning.
How to walk, each day, from the beginning, towards you.

***

THE SUICIDE OF A REFUGEE

You killed yourself, because you had to cross a border,
A border between man and man,
A border between violence and violence. Borders are a violent place.
Because borders are war.
Wars killed your body, your bread, your power, your faith in people.
The faith that people are home was dead.
Because you saw the flicker of death inside you.
Death was the only peace available.
You crossed the border, alone.

***

In war, we escape from a ship that sunk to a ship that sinks,
And we lose men in all the ships of the world,
In all the bottoms of the seas,
Teachers, friends, love.
Life is the art of loss, the biggest artist of loss.
We lost some men to sadness,
The sadness of a dream, invisible in its nakedness, invisible in its thirst.
And we lost some people on the road.
They went on another path,
To a journey that wasn't ours, to a dream that wasn't ours.
They were not naked. They had shoes over their steps.

***

THE GERMAN SOLDIERS IN THE EAST
Someone among you should have said:
For me, there should be a face of home,
But, under the iron faces,
There was no face. It was empty.
Someone among you should have asked:
Why am I here, where there is no face of home,
Where the way home is a killer. It kills me.

***

You knew very little
Until the last hour.
You didn't know that a man lasts less than a seed,
A tiny seed. You didn't know the rage of a seed.
You didn't know that the farmers, the simple farmers,
Were not simple at all, they were a seed,
That they knew how to sow death,
They knew how to sow their hands, the motions of living:
The immense seed,
In all the continents of life.

***

The times are strange, you can trust nothing.
Talking about nature is almost a crime,
There is human nature inside nature.
It has to be silenced.
I went to the cities
Where all the streets lead to the markets of sweat,
To the silence of the sweat.
Maybe I made the sweat less silent,
But for sure, matter, the infinite matter,
The mother of change deep inside me,
Changed my face, a child of hate,
It changed my face, natural as a miracle .
I learned, each day more, how to hate less. Hate is a river of mud.
How to struggle with clear water in my eyes.

***

TO MARX
We dreamed a beautiful dream.
We played it on a wonderful stage,
But our face was a fallen curtain.
We have to look, each one, in his own way,
For his dream.
Some dreams have power.
Some dreams can raise the curtain high, very high.
We need a dream in order to know
The stage we play on, what we play, with whom we play,
Who is it inside us that plays.
Some dreams made the journey to theatre of humans,
They remember the actors: The people.
They know these actors are the play, the stage.
They know that the people are the fabric they are made of.
They know that the people need a dream, and the dream needs the people.

***

THE ENGLISH MEN IN GREECE
They loot you. They loot your name. They loot the past.
You miss the past, the family of who you are, where you are,
The family of your name.
You are alone.
The motions of living are strangers.
The motions of living are nameless.
It's time you take your history back.

***

Everything is modern: the weapons, the violence.
We are violent in a new way.
We kill with one bomb more lives.
We kill without seeing their face, their name,
The grimaces of pain, the eyes of fear.
The faces have no eyes, the faces have no face.
And the name Hiroshima reminds you nothing. It is blind.

***

We shouldn't forget the banal:
That everything is temporary,
That we are temporary.
We shouldn't negate the banal, just because it is banal.
Maybe, nature, the infinite nature loves playing.
Playing is power.
It loves to change the shape of who we are, what we are.
Nature plays with temporary things: our souls.
The playing is exquisite, it leaves nothing banal in the temporary.

***

You should learn how to doubt,
Because history was written by men.
Matter, the infinite matter, was here
From the first moment of the first hour,
And it has another history.
The earthquakes beneath power,
Drown ships in a wave:
A tremble of nature. Empires die in this tremble.
Nature is truth.
You don't know how immense you are
When the person in your head thinks, doubts,
When he looks a little fearful
At the crusaders of power,
At the pirates of beauty,
And he doubts.

**

The market is everything.
They sell the minds of humans, what they think, what they know.
The profit is holy, the loss- a sin.
They don't want an innocent world.
Innocence is dangerous, truth is a murderer.
They don't want to abolish the altars.
There is a whole world left to sacrifice, endless people.
Maybe, one day, nothing will be left,
No altar, no people, no world.
Profit and loss will be the same.

***

The army is in alert.
It uses defense to attack,
It attacks by defending the homeland.
They don't know that the people are the only homeland,
That they attack by defending the homeland that they are.
The most powerful attack. The most innocent.

***

You celebrate something ancient.
An ancient ritual, as ancient as man.
You are godless, but you know who you are, where you come from.
And suddenly a man rises,
He prays to the god of the churches.
You don't know if he left in a corner of the sky a paradise to pray to.
Remember: you are who you are, and you are with whom you are.
Remember: something s are contagious: the fear that makes the gods-gods,
The fear that makes a prayer- prayer.
Remember: you should know with whom you are. Always.

***

AN ANSWER TO SOMEONE DOUBTING THE VICTORY OF THE RUSSIANS AGAINST THE GERMANS.
Before the big earthquake,
There were small earthquakes, always more, always deeper.
People built the houses different: lighter, lower.
They continued to grow gardens in the cracked earth,
They continued to celebrate feasts in the cracked earth.
They felt safe.
But the big earthquake came, the black teeth of earth.
It devoured everything,
The houses, the gardens, the feasts, the people.
The earthquake was buried for too long,
It unearthed another earth. Deeper, secret, clear.

***

The times are not friendly for friendship.
The people work too much, they sell their hands, silently, up to the last hand available.
They are tired, and friendship needs power.
Maybe, one day, life would be less hard work.
Maybe, we'll have the power to take our hands back,
The power to be a friend of the hands.
When you hold a hand you understand what the person says,
Deeper, better, clear.
You understand his silence.
***

THE WAR BEHIND THE FRONT
In war, everything can be sold, everything is a merchandise.
In the market men sell their daughters. They cannot sell the hunger.
In the cafes, the old people draw maps on the tables. They sell victories.
And in the news papers they sell the truth of lies, the truth of blood.

***

In these times, in this town,
Trust is impossible.
Our silence has an empty face, a monument to the nothing.
The papers with our name, the stamps, are the only proof that we exist.
We shouldn't be lost in the silence, in the stamps.
We should remember our birth- name, who we are, that life is not paper.
We should protect our lies,
In order to protect our truth.

***

Hollywood is another kind of market.
It sells paradise and hell in one package. A special offer.
And Los Angeles, the city of the angels,
Sells angels, the feathers of petrol. The bleed.
The black blood.
It sells the smell of petrol to hope.
But in the evening, the angels are too tired to be angels.
They go to the market of the night, to buy the bodies of the night.
And it is sad,
The sperm, the infinite sperm,
Smells of petrol.

***

Hollywood,
They sell dreams in the market of dreams: the rainbow on a screen,
And in the market of men.
And the men pay them, each day from the beginning,
With petrol in their wallet. Petrol is paper, like money.
And with a dead star in their night. Stars shine long after they die.
They are beautiful. They are lonely.
Dreams are a harsh mistress.

***

The sea has no graves.
We lose friends in the sea.
They drown, slowly, each day more, each day deeper.
It is the sea we spoke about for long,
We said there are not many seas,
There is only one ocean.
And yet, they drowned, each in his own sea.
Maybe they loved their sea, enough to die for it,
And it is sad,
We cannot help them.
They are in the ocean.

***

You are a travelling salesman.
You know men ask for the impossible,
To sell what cannot be sold: your dream.
To put a price tag on the priceless.
They want you to be one of them,
To drink with them their thirst.
They need a dream in order to play, a toy of life,
In order to endure themselves.
But your dream is different.
Your dream is a river, a boat in the wild water. The Noah bark to human.
And it is sad,
Because they are thirsty.

***

Somewhere you make a wrong move, a mistake.
It hurts you, you want to leave.
You don't realize that wherever you go,
The wrong move will move in your motions.
Maybe you should stay.
You may realize mistakes can be power.
After all, the journey to human chose so many wrong moves in all the cross roads of the world .
They led us.

***

You struggled with your people for too long.
You feel exhausted.
You don't realize that exhaustion may be power,
That it may discover inside you, beneath the fatigue,
Another kind of strength. A strength you didn't know.
And when the battle is at its peak, when it is tall, as tall as a human,
It is the power to remember why you struggle, who you struggle,
With whom you struggle. The power to remember why you must win.
You don't know how immense you are when you remember.

***

THE COURT IN NAZI GERMANY
Dimitrof, my friend,
You speak in the dark,
But all those who are in the dark, hear you.
Darkness hears.
You ask questions. You see the dark inside the dark.
You speak about the guilt of the guilty.
They will kill you,
But they cannot kill the questions, they cannot kill the guilt.
Their violence will kill them.
Violence is blind, it doesn't see who it kills.
Their hatred will kill them. Hatred is blind too.
No one can survive with so much hatred in his bones.
You speak about the innocence of the innocent.
Innocence is power.
It is not a lamb, it is a dove.
It knows the way home.
It knows the way to the magnetic circle of living,
The heartbeat of the world in it heartbeat.

***

We didn't trust him.
He was too eloquent, yet he was silent.
But he spoke .
He spoke about the innocence of the guilty.
He spoke about the guilt of the innocent.
He gave the ones whose life was cold- frozen continents.
He gave the ones whose life was homeless- a roof of rain.
He spoke, but his truth was deaf, blind, ready for nothing.
No truth can say what it doesn't know.
No truth can stand, except on the legs of what's real, the exquisite legs.
His truth had no legs.

***
People are afraid of violence.
They don't realize that the small things that someone imposes on them-
The small crimes, each day from the beginning, are violence.
We are not violent.
We demand the smallest things, the indispensable, the things life needs,
Simple, natural as magic, invisible as the necessary.
In the uphill of our soul, we want people near us,
The only safety net we'll ever have.

***

We are not romantic.
We need your strength, in order to let the people go on,
To continue their journey to the small days, the journey to human.
We step on you, and we never sing you,
Black mother, the asphalt.

***

THE DOCTOR
They leave you the wounded in a room.
He is half beaten, half dead.
And they want him to live
In order to kill him at the wall.
They forget that you gave an oath,
An oath to heal in order to live.
This oath is ancient, an ancient stone: another kind of wall,
Invisible in its height, invisible in its depth.
The border of the human.

***

There are people who are buried like a Pharaoh,
With all their treasures.
Their poetry book: small shining icons,
Some sheets of paper scribbled with words,
Maybe ideas that didn't know where to go.
There is the window with faces, with the world in them.
They were mothers, they were the milk. They lie by them.
The mirror with quiet wrinkles, gentle eye brows,
When they wanted to write something nice about themselves.
Old story books. The past was a high way, a direction.
The past was a tired jug of water. They were thirsty.

***

TOMB STONE OF A SOLDIER
No one woke me up,
So I went to the war asleep, dreaming.
I didn't know that I shot the bread at all the walls of the world,
I didn't know I couldn't kill the hunger.
I didn't know that I shot my dreams.

***

THE BOMBARDED CITY
The ruins of the city.
A wall that resisted everything .
Something has changed.
You cannot change even a comma in the laws of nature,
But bombs are the laws of man.
You can draw on them pictures: the picture of a cry,
The mouth twisted, unrecognizable. You recognize yourself.
The picture of silence, a moment before the walls shriek.

***

THE CRACK
Money becomes paper.
The hunger is everywhere, there is not enough paper to eat.
And the houses become paper. The taxes that were not paid
Were magic: they made them paper.
In a small village:
A farmer and his miniscule field.
The horse. The ribs carve the marble skin. Innocence carved on the skin.
They want to kill the horse. It is ill.
They don't know that its only disease is the hunger.
Strangely, the only revolt, was the revolt of the farmers.
They protected the horse, the innocence of the ribs.
They waited for the soldier with their old hunger,
With their old hungry bullets.
They killed them, but they couldn't kill the hunger, the rage of a seed.
They painted the wall with blood.
The horse became paper, but not the blood.

***

You are young. You know so little, and you want so much.
You hope that the past, the strange old man, will lead you.
The past is power, it remembers . But memories are not enough,
Not enough to know where to go.
You grow old. You still know too little,
But you didn't lose the power to hope,
You hope that the future, a strange youngster, will lead you.
The future is strength, it is pure infinite.
It may know where you are, where to go.
Hope is power, no matter how old it is,
And you need power to hope, no matter what time ie is in your life.

***

A friend dies slowly,
She escapes the hunger, the wall, the ruins in her lungs.
She came like someone who comes in a big crowd.
She died, with all the crowd inside her.
She was alone in her death, yet she didn't die alone.
At night, when I look at the sky,
I feel her ruined lungs,
They breathe in the breath of the most distant star.
They breathe the world she wanted to heal, her breath was hungry.

***

The ruins that used to be roads,
They walked towards something, each day, from the beginning.
Some things were left,
Like a deserted theatre stage.
Some masks, some plots,
The actors need them, they tell them who they are.
Half a sofa, for a whole theatrical love.
You don't recognize the play,
But you know all the stages of ruins,
So, you have no questions.

***

Some people
Use words that have something of motion in them.
The motion of the past in the now, in the here.
It could be a rivulet, threaded in a table cloth.
It could be an empty jug of water. It pours the deep void. A painting of thirst.
As if the words were colors, flowing on the canvass, natural as magic.
You recognize something of yourself,
Something you didn't know, or you didn't remember.
You recognize yourself long before you were born.
You recognize where the motion of the thirst, where it began.
The empty jug in what you feel, in what you hope,
The empty jug in what life needs. The motion of necessity. The big motion. The biggest.

***

At times, in court, the innocent is found innocent.
Maybe the judge was in good mood, the weather was beautiful,
Or maybe he needed something to amaze himself,
To feel that innocence is not always a crime.

***

The good people want to learn how to be better, always more,
And teaching them, makes you better, always more.
You leave, you return, they are changed,
But the change is not what you hoped.
Maybe you needed to be far from yourself, to be saved.
You don't know that the good people cannot save you.
You don't know that the good people will bring you closer to yourself, always deeper,
To the mine field in your head.
You don't know that the good people can save you, long after you saved yourself,
After you walked, one by one, over all the mines.

The good people have big eyes, like a child, like the skull of the old. They see you,
And they trust your eyes only when you see them,
When you touch the circle of seeing in their gaze.
Seeing is an act of faith.

***

We were alone. Wars kill the trust even before they kill us.
In front of us, everything was foreign.
The motions of the days, of the hours,
Were beautiful gloves. Blind gloves.
Everything was a stranger, except the body of love,
But there was so little love in our love.

***

You decide to return the way you left. Natural, absolute.
But your footprints were washed by the rain of time, by the crystal of hail and time.
Nothing can return the way it came,
Time rolls in all the ways, like a stone in its abyss.
Nothing can tell you which way to choose.
You have to choose, barefoot or with shoes,
Each step, from the beginning,
Each choice, from the beginning.

***

You sit on a quiet chair,
Your big shoes on the quiet floor.
Your quiet face, your quiet wrinkles.
The invisible peace.
You wait for no one, no one waits for you,
The quiet is a friend.
It trusts you, it accepts you in its invisible arms.
It knows what you think, alone, beneath the quiet.

***

The best plays
Are the ones with something unfinished inside them.
The ones full with imperfections, like life.
And they may go far, deep in what we see, what we feel, what we think,
As if they had some small infinites inside them.
Maybe, because they are alive.
Maybe something finished has nowhere to go. It has no infinites. It dies.

And so, the words we use should have something unfinished inside them,
They should leave room for other words,
Because words change when we change,
And change leaves them unfinished:
Words
Invisible in their nakedness,
Invisible in their imperfect perfection.

***

We should know
That the ones who really listen,
Are the ones who will ask.
And we should be prepared always.
We should begin walking before, much before the first step,
And we should speak before, much before the first word.
And we should utter the first question mark, before, long before we ask.
We should be ready like the rain before the cloud.

***

Nothing is foreign, nothing is finished,
And for good reason.
We should leave before us momentary phrases,
Unfinished small wisdoms,incomplete things.
They can be used in a hundred ways, they can complete each other,
Like the Lego blocks of a child.
They can build a Lego city.
They can build the human weather, beautiful Lego winds.
The same wind never lasts forever.

***

There is the fear of the future.
The great builder. The great destroyer of cities.
There are dreams which no one can understand.
We should remember that the future is full of past.
That a city is built before, much before the first stone,
That a dream is dreamed, before, long before it was dreamed.
That the future begins before, long before it begins.
Room enough to build a city, to dream a dream,
To become clear, to speak in a language that all the three times understands,
That the people in time understand.
Room enough for hope.

***

It is useless to try to change the unchangeable,
But, we have to know, long before the motion, the trying,
What is changeable.
Change is power, and the unchangeable is power.
They make us what we are.
We don't know how immense we are when we recognize them,
When we recognize our face in their face.

***

Power has many faces.
The same power can be used to climb the uphill of our soul,
To plow a field of stones,
To bear a child.
The same power that we use in the journey from hour to hour,
In the journey to human.
And each step exhausts us. Fatigue is a power too.
It discovers the strength beneath our strength, the strength to know
Why we go on. Why the struggle in each steps, every time from the beginning.
How far we can go, further, much further that what we imagine.

***

Victory has many faces.
A thought that is a smuggler of borders, a smuggler of dreams.
A picture drawn, you can touch the motion of time on the canvass.
A new continent of life discovered.
And the victory of going towards the human always more,
In each picture, in each thought, in each continent,
And in each step, barefoot or with shoes.

***

We use power all the time.
We live, we breath, we plow the fields of stones,
We build cities.
We let the person in our head be free. He writes poems.
The journey from hour to hour, the journey to the world, use power,
The immense power.
And we begin it again, each day, each moment, from the beginning.
We use power to remember who we are,
To remember in which station of the journey to human we are, the endless journey.

There are big dreams.
These dreams drink power.
These dreams give us a jug full of power: water.
They know we are thirsty.
They know thirst is a power too. It drinks, thirst by thirst, from the river of time,
It knows what time it is in our thirst, what time it is in our dream.

***

Maybe the only mother land are the people,
So, trains smuggle borders, like birds.
And dreams smuggle the barbed wires between gods and earth.
The journey to human is the biggest smuggler,
It smuggles the borders of tongues, of flags, of thoughts, of songs.
The journey is innocent, like the smuggler birds.

***

Only the men who cannot leave,
Should stay.
The ones who have no choice.
The ones who tilled the earth for years and it tilled them.
The one who built a village, and it built them.
They have no choice, they have to stay.
Only the ones who have no choice can change something.
Whoever can leave, should leave.

Before you go to the battle,
You should ask yourself if you have a choice, if you can leave.
The ones who have no choice:
Hunger is not a choice, and the cold in your life is not a choice,
Will fight like someone who has nowhere to go, nowhere except the war of the bread.
His war will be different.

***

THE ACTRESS
Her name was Vlasova.
She was able to change and remain the same, the two sides of a coin in her face.
She was Medea, she was Antigoni, she was Mother Courage.
She knew what power is,
She had the power to exile herself into the plays, into the lives of others.
After all, she was exile in her life, exile in her sadness.

***

We shouldn't wait for the impossible:
For Messiah, for the lion nursing the lamb..
We should foresee the possible, the reality of the real.
In the arena of the impossible:
The dead lamb in our body,
The lion's teeth in all the streets of our blood.
We don't know how immense we are when the possible wins, thumb up,
In the big arena of the world. The biggest.

***

A FRIENDS WAS CAUGHT BY THE GERMANS
We saw him,
Amidst the broken breath, the dark blood.
He was silent. His blood was silent.
We knew that inside his silence he was free.
We knew that inside his silence he walked towards us,
Always more, always deeper.

***

THE GERMANS IN THE CONCENTRATION CAMPS
There are people buried in the camp,
Buried beneath the fists, beneath the rope, beneath the hunger.
Exiled from any human words.
And their only guilt was
That some believed in another god.
Living as a Jew needs power, and also the dying.
And they didn't realize that the power was inside them:
Some remembered they were human,
They heard the silence of the gods.
And some believed in Marx,
And more than anything else, they believed in the people.
They were ready to die for the people,
And now, they die for the people, and for anything worth dying for.
They die, like an animal, with a knife in their cry.
They die like a human. Silent. They are free in their silence.

***

They silence the people in coffins.
The agitators, the ones who shouted too much, or maybe toolittle.
So they can no longer speak about the hunger, about the roof of rain,
About how people are the only safety net available.
And yet, coffins have power. They are not really silent.
They remind you that the only place to speak is life,
The only place where your roof f rain can cry

***

The village is quiet, and the fields,
The postman is quiet,
And the house is quiet.
Only the window, like all windows, is a rebel. It sees.
It knows that in war, the quiet is glass.
It is fragile, it breaks, your eyes tear glass. The big noise of the glass deafens the quiet,
And you continue, deaf, blind, ready for nothing.

***

It is not a good time to paint, the make sculptures.
The bombs are as blind as hail, the iron hail.
Maybe we should protect our art,
We should hide it in caves,
Or even paint on the walls of the caves,
Like the first artist ever, the first man.
Maybe, one day, on our way to human,
We'll dig out the pictures.
We'll be amazed how beautiful we could be.
We'll touch time in the pictures, we'll touch the past, the wars.
And we'll touch more; we'll touch hope.
The journey to human is hope.
Beauty is hope.

***

You are ill, and you need a healer,
But there is no healer to save us.
Maybe they are innocent,
Maybe they don't realize what consumes us:
The ten fingers of hunger in our mouth.
Maybe they should have learned better the disease of the people,
The big disease, the biggest:
The last bread in the plate.

***

The earlier the poor wakes up,
The more hands he produces.
And the merchant of humans can sell them, always cheaper.
He doesn't realize he sells a masterpiece:
The hands, the immense hands of a human.
Maybe, for him, the only masterpiece is price.
It is easy to stick a price tag on the priceless.

***

GERMANY

The hungry mother of hungry seeds, of hungry blood.
Time flowed in your rage,
Like blood from the slit throat of a child.
I know your hungry blood, I know your rage,
I know the slit throat of a child: my childhood.
I was guilty. Innocence was dead.

***

Maybe the future will be better.
We'll give the fatigue back its power. It will become wheat.
We'll give back the hands their power. They'll own themselves,
They'll own whatever they make.
We'll build a kitchen, an immense kitchen, the hands will raise a cup of victory:
A pot of soup. We'll give the hands back their warmth.
It is time to take our hands back.

Whoever doesn't demand justice, loses his justice. His justice becomes unjust.
Whoever had to sell his hands, and he doesn't take them back:
He loses his hands, and whatever the hands made:
The house, the bread, the pictures, the handshake, love.
It is time to take the justice back, the hands back,
Because time flows in everything, it makes the late, too late.

So, if we want to live,
As if in a place that is not our own,
As if in a life that is not our own,
We have no right for the right
We have no right for innocence.
We have no right for hope.
Because the right for our life is not ours.

***

For some unknown reason,
Stranger exiled from their land,
Are also exiled from the right to be human, to have a name,
To have the right to be right.
We are all strangers, nomads in the world, nomads in our life.
Maybe, now, there are too many strangers,
And too few rights left.

***

Maybe, one day,
The rights to be human, will be as many as the humans.
The rights to own the hands, will be as many as the hands.
And life will be enough, enough to till the roads
And to be tilled by them: the way from hour to hour, from day to day,
Will be wider, deeper.
And life will be enough, enough to live.

***

Someone leaves us, someone precious.
He leaves something simple, a footprint in your blood.
And yet, you realize there was someone precious in your life.
You don't know how immense you are when you recognize it,
When you realize something beautiful came and stayed,
Even though it left.

***

A dreamer leaves us. Someone precious.
And we remain without a map, without a compass.
After all, the journey to human was real,
And yet, it needed the big dreamer
To bring it from station zero to midnight, the twelfth station.
The station before dawn.
We should remember that the dreamer leaves the dream inside us.
The dream is a seed. It feels the magnetic circle of living.
It knows the way to the wheat.

***

Some people speak in all the important occasions:
In the academies, the big plazas.
They speak about the life of people, their work.
And we don't know how can so many speak about something they don't know.
You cannot say a truth you don't know. There is no truth in your truth.
We should remember that listening is a power,
And we have to know how to use it, where to use it, when to use it.
We need power to use power. Always.

***

THE DELEGATES
You sold the ones who knew the truth.
All that was left was to sell your life. You sold it cheap.
You didn't have any more truths to offer.
You'll live, you'll die
Among the strangers to who you sold yourself,
Among the strangers who want to sell you.
You'll live, you'll die, invisible as something that was sold, that was consumed.
You'll live, you'll die, always further from the people.
The smell of truth kills you, each day from the beginning, each day deeper.

***

THE VICTORY MARCH OF THE REVOLUTION
The only ones to march should be the people,
The simple people, that are never really simple.
The workers with new tools, the use the old to make the new.
These tools are power. They are rebels.
They are the footprints of a revolution.
And the farmers carry the wheat, they carry their truth.
The farmers carry rebels:
The wheat full of dawns.
This dawn will be for everybody.

***

The meadow by the sea
Is beautiful in a quiet way,
And the fog is salty, yet calm.
Somewhere, a small house.
It is white in a quiet way,
Only the doors are rebels.
The open at night, they let in
The homeless, the ones who have only a roof of rain,
As if these doors felt that this roof is a crime. It can kill.
Maybe, rebels can feel how this roof rains into their life,
Into what they remember, into who they are,
Without an umbrella of mercy.

***

It is spring afternoon in the suburb.
The small houses, painted with twilight,
The orchard, painted with fruit.
At the long table: the workers.
They speak little. They are tired.
They seem like another kind of fruit:
Too tired to leave the tree, to make the big leap.
And yet, beneath the fatigue there is always power.
A power deep, stubborn, absolute.
No one will eat this fruit.

***

He was a big man.
A simple, poor travelling salesman.
He was an adventurer of life.
He spent his feeling without limits,
They were priceless. They had no price tag.
Maybe, he knew how to live, without limits.
How to touch people, the ten fingers of a touch- without limits.
The make the ten fingers inexhaustible .

***

In school, the children of poverty knew little.
They had to work even before they knew how to live.
They were too tired to think.
When school ended, they had nothing to sell,
Maybe, they had the small wisdoms of hunger,
But, hunger is not a merchandise. They sold their sweat.
And then, they sold their life.
Wars love the poor, they are invisible.
They buried them in a common grave in Flanders, in Dunkirk.
They are as invisible as the river of time that flows deep, in everything.
The river is pain. The river is hope. The river is power.

***

You speak, and you don't think
Who, except you, needs your words.
You speak, but you don't know how much truth there is in your truth.
You speak, but the question is where your motions of living move.
Your motions, how you move inside the motions, how you move inside your life,
Are foreigners in your words.
Who you are is foreigner in your words.
These words are powerless,
And yet, they defeat you.

***

We split.
We go, each in his own way.
We said little.
The pin that fell from your tie, the shining metal,
The blood in my shoes,
Are not silent. They speak.
At times, words say too much,
More, much more than what is necessary.

***

I came to you as a teacher,
I stayed because I learned.
I had to leave, but I never really left.
I needed your silent water, the thirst of water.
I needed you, in order to feel the silence inside each word:
A big magnifying lens. The biggest
I needed you in order to know I never left.
I needed you in order to learn what I teach, why I teach.

***

The net of the system
Is a good safety net,
As long as you ask for the possible:
A nice house in the suburbs,
Far away from the smell of poverty, the acid smell,
Far away from the rebellion of lips, from your fear.
You believe you are safe.
You don't realize that safety nets are not forever,
That they need reality woven in the net.
That the river of time flows in all the nets of the world.
They drown.
You don't realize that your fear knows always where you are.
Life is not a safe place.
Fear is a lonely alley.
You are alone.

***

There are people we call barren,
And we don't see the hungry seeds
In all their motions of living.
We don't see how they bear pain.
Seeds can bear trees, leaves,
They can bear the green storm of a leaf,
The storm we that rains exquisite drops of air over us, inside us.
They can bear the rain in a leaf, the yellow rain. The pain of a leaf is yellow.
We never know what pain can bear.

***

Being poor
Is not a synonym to honest.
Hunger may invade you, silent as an animal of prey.
It may give you ten claws . They are not honest
But the pain of hunger is honest.
So, the ten claws that tore the blood of someone,
The ten claws that tore your flesh, the way your hunger does,
The ten claws are guilty and innocent at the same time.

***

You feel immense,
You wrote books, important books.
Maybe, somewhere inside,
You don't believe in what you wrote,
You are not sure what is important.
And somewhere
You are an old man in his old room.
You read, for the last time, your book.
You are sad,
Because you were right.

***

It is night in the world.
It is night inside us.
We are those who lost their last illusions:
The lords of war, the flags, the borders of pain.
We didn't lose what's real. Reality exists.
In reality, night ends, each night.
In reality, nothing is forever, not even the illusions.
After all, reality is matter, the infinite matter,
The magician of change.

***

THE YOUTH IN NAZI GERMANY
Wars are a hungry animal,
They devour life, souls, they devour money: it becomes paper.
But the youth don't know it.
They tell them that the war is an adventure, nothing more.
That they kill animals,
That they kill them the way men always killed an animal:
With a knife in its cry.
Hunting animals is legal.
They tell them that wars are a conquest,
They purify the world from the weak.
That the bullets are holy.
But, the youth will grow,
If they didn't die in the meantime.
Maybe they'll feel remorse. The animals were human.
Maybe they'll feel the humiliation of defeat.
Humiliation is a slave trader.
It buys them for a pouch of coins.
It defeats them, more, much more than the wars.

***