El sonido

Me acerco con cuidado porque es leve,

y me gustaría mucho que no lo fuera.

El sonido sigue su curso,

que sea siempre el mismo

y pueda dejarnos tan fuera de sí

es lo extraordinario.

(s.figueroa, La dirección del sonido)

Wisława Szymborska, a quien le toque

A Speech at the Lost and Found


I lost a few goddesses on my way from south to north,
as well as many gods on my way from east to west.
Some stars went out on me for good: part for me, O sky.
Island after island collapsed into the sea on me.
I'm not sure exactly where I left my claws,
who wears my fur, who dwells in my shell.
My siblings died out when I crawled onto land
and only a tiny bone in me marks the anniversary.
I leapt out of my skin, squandered vertebrae and legs,
and left my senses many many times.
Long ago I closed my third eye to it all,
waved it off with my fins, shrugged my branches.

Scattered by the four winds to a place that time forgot,
how little there remains of me surprises me a lot,
a singular being of human kind for now,
who lost her umbrella in a tram somehow.

foto: Massimo Bartera

A Large Number

Four billion people on this earth,

but my imagination is the way it's always been:

bad with large numbers.

It is still moved by particularity.

It flits about the darkness like a flashlight beam,

disclosing only random faces,

while the rest go blindly by,

unthought of, unpitied.

Not even a Dante could have stopped that.

So what do you do when you're not,

even with all the muses on your side?


Non omnis moriar-a premature worry.

Yet am I fully alive, and is that enough?

It never has been, and even less so now.

I select by rejecting, for there's no other way,

but what I reject, is more numerous,

more dense, more intrusive than ever.

At the cost of untold losses-a poem, a sigh.

I reply with a whisper to a thunderous calling.

How much I am silent about I can't say.

A mouse at the foot of mother mountain.


Life lasts as long as a few lines of claws in the sand.


My dreams-even they are not as popolous as they should be.

There is more solitude in them than crowds or clamor.

Sometimes someone long dead will drop by for a bit.

A single hand turns a knob.

Annexes of echo overgrow the empty house.

I run from the threshold down into the quiet


valley, seemingly no one's-an anachronism by now.


Where does all this space still in me come from-

that I don't know.




(Szymborska, .....of humand kind for now....)