Poem: The glass of water on stone!

By Arian Galdini

On the first morning,

when Valletta had not yet decided

whether to wake as a city

or as a great stone

breathing beside the water,

on the railing of a stairway

stood a glass.

Plain water.

No hand beside it.

No note.

No sign asking to be honored.

Only the glass,

with a line of salt on its rim,

so thin

it might have been what the sea had left,

or the memory of a mouth

that had drunk without leaving a name.

The steps descended toward the harbor.

On their stone

the night had not left darkness,

but a slight chill,

the kind of chill things keep

before daylight touches them

and asks them to be seen.

I did not take the glass.

I did not try to know

who had left it there.

There are questions

that ruin the gift

before a person understands

it was a gift.

Below, the harbor water

moved without sound.

A small boat

drew a little away from its rope,

then returned,

like a thought

that does not wish to leave

what holds it.

On the other side,

a door opened.

No one came out at once.

Only a warm line

appeared at the threshold,

and behind it

a woman set a small bowl

on the floor

for a cat that was waiting

with the patience of those

who know the world

owes them nothing

and can still be good.

The cat drank.

Then lifted its head

without asking thanks

of anyone.

This was the first Malta,

a glass of water on stone,

a low bowl for a cat,

a threshold that did not turn kindness

into an event.

Valletta opened slowly.

The streets descended toward the water

without shaming the foot’s fatigue.

The balconies held old colors

not like dead memories,

but like thin wooden voices

that had learned not to shout.

A man lifted the shutter of his shop.

The iron trembled a little.

Inside, several oranges

rolled in a crate

and came to rest beside one another,

like small days

asking for no other sky.

On a wall

a piece of shadow

climbed slowly.

It did not look like an absence of light.

It looked like the place

where light rested

so as not to become unbearable.

The water in the glass

was no larger

than a sip.

But before the harbor,

before the ships,

before that wide water

which had tested the island

with fear, with trade, with waiting,

it did not lose its measure.

I did not say this.

Sentences, on such an island,

should be kept for a little later.

Better to watch

how a spoon falls into a cup,

how a man ties a rope,

how an unknown child

runs three steps

and stops only because a pigeon

has crossed before him.

The cat, meanwhile,

licked the rim of the bowl

and went slowly away

into a narrow street where the shadow

did not seem hidden,

but sheltered.

This smallness of morning

did not try to persuade me.

Because a man who comes

from a language where bread and wounds

have often sat in the same sentence

does not immediately trust

what is gentle.

He sees it as a window that may close.

As a hand that perhaps wants something.

But the glass wanted nothing.

Nor did the cat’s bowl.

Nor the door.

Nor the salt on the rim.

This made the morning

harder to resist.

In Valletta,

nothing spoke to me loudly.

The stone did not say what it had seen.

The doors did not count those who had entered.

The water did not explain the sea.

Only the glass,

left on the stair,

held a small sky,

enough for a human lip.

Later, in Mdina,

the day changed substance.

Valletta was air over water.

Mdina was stone

that had passed its voice

inside itself.

The gate of the silent city

did not ask where a man came from.

It did not measure his language.

It did not look at his weariness.

It let him enter

as a little shadow enters

a white courtyard,

without noise,

without written permission,

without disturbing the day.

The streets were narrow,

but not closed.

The windows had thin curtains.

One of them moved a little

in the wind,

then stopped,

as if someone inside

had taken a breath

and had found that enough.

Where sorrow is expected,

shadow did not ruin the light.

The street did not hurry.

A closed door

did not seem an enemy.

At a bend beside a wall,

some yellow flowers

had come out of the small bit of earth

barely held among the stones.

They were not there to adorn the city.

They were not there for visitors.

Nor were they brave.

They had come out

because life, when it finds a crack,

does not ask history for permission.

Mdina’s stone

was not made heavier by them.

It had seen enough

not to be startled by anything,

and still it let the flowers

contradict it without anger.

A bird landed on a roof.

Then rose.

Nothing changed.

Precisely this

made the moment clean.

In a small square,

an old woman passed

with a bag in her hand.

Inside the bag

something round lightly touched

the thin skin of the plastic.

Perhaps fruit.

Perhaps bread.

Perhaps nothing of importance.

But her walk had that clarity

which does not come from victory,

but from the long repetition

of things that must be done

so life will not fall

from the hands.

She passed.

The city did not record her.

And that was right.

The sea below the city

was not always visible.

Sometimes it arrived only as taste.

A little salt on the lips.

A little cold in the palm.

A widening

in the chest,

without knowing why.

It did not call.

It stayed below the edges

and left the ships

to appear brave.

At that hour,

Albania did not come as a flag.

Nor as an uplifted pain.

It came more quietly,

like another stone in the sole,

like a voice that does not push you to speak,

but to keep from walking crooked.

It came with difficult mornings,

with people who had lived on little

and had not sold their faces,

with tables where joy

had to sit down carefully

so as not to seem unjust

toward those who had suffered.

In Malta,

for a rare time,

that care did not disappear.

It only softened.

In Valletta,

a boat rocked without guilt.

In Mdina,

the curtain moved without fear.

At the doorway,

the glass of water had held the sky

without making it its own.

And the pain,

the one a person carries with him

even when he tells no one its name,

did not leave.

It simply did not take everything.

In the afternoon,

the walls changed color.

They were not adorned.

They came nearer.

A fine warmth rose in the stone,

not enough to call it consolation,

but enough

for the hand not to pull away at once.

A man laughed somewhere far off.

His voice struck lightly against the bend

and became part of the street.

No one turned.

No one was troubled.

The city accepted even that voice

as a small wave is accepted,

not changing the shore,

only reminding it

that water is still at work.

When the road descended again

toward Valletta,

the morning glass returned to mind.

Perhaps someone had drunk it.

Perhaps it had spilled.

Perhaps the hand that took it

did not know it was removing

the center of a day from its place.

It did not matter.

The glass had done its work.

It had not filled the world.

It had left a little air

between a person

and the weight he carried.

One step asked for no proof.

One heavy memory

did not rise

to command the evening.

At evening,

when the lights came on one by one

and the water took on the color of soft iron,

Malta no longer seemed small.

Not because it had grown.

Because inside a person

the old demand

to give everything

a magnitude

had gone quiet for a while.

The last road opened without haste.

Behind me,

a door closed.

Ahead, the harbor darkened.

On a stair,

the stone still held

the warmth of the day.

Nothing was taken.

No stone.

No flower.

No testimony.

Only a little loosened air

in the place

where weariness

had sat too long.

And far off,

as the city lowered its voice

into its own lights,

the glass of water

still held at the bottom

a thin salt of light.

Arian Galdini