Poems

Strategic

I met a salt cedar
 
by the sea
 
It was a cheerful stately green
 
I sat with it and shared my troubles many times
 
caressing its rough, wise trunk
 
To its rustling branches I would trust
 
all the things I couldn’t tell
 
Before my return to the city we embraced, bid farewell
 
Till next summer, we said
 
 
The next summer I came to the sea
 
there was an emptiness
 
At first I didn’t realise what was missing
 
Then I saw my salt cedar
 
split down the middle
 
obscuring the sea view no longer
 
 
The salt cedar didn’t want me to see it, to let me touch
 
the spots bared of branches
 
Its hollowed trunk filled with leaves
 
and its beautiful upper boughs now disconsolate
 
yellow limbs
 
 
So much did they love the sea they sacrificed its only tree
 
In the quest to possess something, everything else becomes pure obstacle
 
If your strategy means standing in the wrong position
 
you’ll be made to pay the price
 
How could the salt cedar know all this
 
 
What a strange and painful word is love
 
 
I’m standing where the sea begins
 
The sand is wet and thick
 
It takes the shape of my sole where I step
 
But at this zero point of the sea
 
No trace is permanent
 
It will erase me with one coquettish flick
 
 
I come from a city where
 
people leave horseshoe welts on other people’s faces
 
At our fingertips we all have ice
 
packs and cell renewal creams
 
Nights go by caressing those scars
 
Days spent hiding them
 
We call a mass lie the new truth
 
Hypocrisy is going legitimate
 
 
There is always a sense of loss, always a sense
 
of being diminished. As though something of yours
 
were stolen, but you had no idea
 
The longer it went unnamed the more you lost a part of yourself
 
A vast love story dwindled down to matryoshka dolls
 
Since when is the ‘You’re like everyone else now’ mould
 
enough for the ones you love
 
What’s left is always the same old loss of altitude