}} Letters from the Sea ~ Lettere dal mare |

Poetry at Sangam

SangamHouse

 










Letters from the Sea ~ Lettere dal mare

Aequam memento rebus in arduis servare mentem.
Remember when life’s path is steep to keep your mind even.
                                                                         —Horace

 

He told me my skin was soft, placed his body inside, as if his
thoughts weren’t loud, as if his sins weren’t a tapestry of
unbearable echoes, as if his sentences weren’t an end to nowhere,
as if it wasn’t difficult to die.

~

Carry me into another name. Take my lips by the seagulls, take my
body to the mist we once found mercy in, to the roar that split us
in half, and then reassemble me like a still world.

~

The July-blue sky opened beneath our hearts. The birds were
absent. The ships were empty. The bullets drowning us. The
uniforms like a country that’s forgotten the rules of swimming.
What hadn’t we told each other? Where had we gone without
digging into love as if it were eternal water?

~

Sailing down my back were the words you learned in the dark one
night; under the thundered skies sentences are slight shifting stars,
empty heavens, unsettled fogs; the horizon isn’t close, neither are
the splendid suns or the names crushed into my body like
questions we once asked but didn’t want an answer for—

~

The sea is a quake of hours, so remember that long summer
where you saw the moon split into gods.

~

We carried death on the waves, and didn’t feel the weight of our
woe.

~

And the years are away, and the silences are entrances, and the
darkness another distance, and,

~

Death is a misty prayer between two unmoved words.

~

I no longer know where you are, the sea softened after the storm,
I can tell no one what I know.

 
 
 
← Nathalie Handal