Poems

Strategic Position

I had met a Tamarix
 
It was a majestic happy green
 
by the sea
 
I’ve been sitting, sharing my troubles many times with it
 
caressing its rough, well-lived/wise trunk
 
I would leave to its rustling branches
 
all I didn’t tell anyone
 
Before going back to the city we would embrace, bid farewell
 
So long until next summer we would say
 
 
The next summer I came to the sea
 
there was an emptiness
 
First I didn’t understand what was missing
 
When I saw my Tamarix
 
pruned by the middle
 
So that it won’t cut the sea view
 
 
It didn’t want to be seen by me the Tamarix didn’t let me touch
 
itself because when it didn’t have any branches left
 
its trunk filled with leaves and
 
its beautiful branches above were now sad/disconsolate
 
yellow limbs
 
They loved the sea so much that they sacrificed its tree
 
If you are to own something the rest is an obstacle
 
If your strategic position is wrong
 
They will make you pay the price
 
How would the tamarix know all this
 
 
To love is such a weird a painful word
 
 
I am 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 level of the sea
 
No trace is permanent
 
It will erase me in one coquettish movement
 
 
I am from a city where
 
people leave horseshoe traces on each other’s faces
 
Right at our hands we all have ice
 
bags and cell renewal creams
 
Nights go by caressing those traces
 
Days are hiding them
 
We call a mass lie new truth
 
Hypocrisy is gaining legitimacy
 
 
Always a sense of loss, of being diminished
 
exists. As if some of your things
 
were stolen, you had no idea
 
The more you didn’t put a name on it you lost part of yourself
 
Giant loves diminished into matryoshka dolls
 
Since when is the “You’re like everyone else now” mould
 
enough for the ones you love
 
The rest is always the same loss of altitude