Poem: The psalm that does not end!

By Arian Galdini

Do not tell me life is making peace.

I have seen people who reconciled too early

and no one saw them dying.

They went on getting up in the morning,

keeping their hours,

answering when they were called,

laughing where laughter was expected,

but inside them

an entire province had been emptied

without sending word.

Violence did not defeat them.

They were defeated by that thin quiet

that comes when a man, out of weariness,

begins to call fate

what he once would have resisted.

I do not want that peace.

It is not wisdom.

It is exhaustion with a gentle name.

It is the way a person learns

not to hear his own pain anymore,

until the pain itself begins to think

that nothing ever happened.

At a bend in the city,

where the crowd was breaking apart

between the scream, the camera, and haste,

I saw a child without shoes.

He was asking for nothing.

That was heavier

than any prayer.

His heels were blackened by the road,

but he did not stand there as one lost.

He stood with that other stillness

known only to those

from whom so much has been taken

that even complaint

would seem a luxury of the rich.

He did not look at me as a savior.

Nor did he look at me as guilty.

He stood beyond my pity,

beyond my shame,

beyond that late kindness

with which we try

to save our own face

before a poverty

that does not know how to thank us.

Then I understood:

he had not lost the road.

The road had lost the human being.

Around him the century passed.

It passed with bright screens,

with news that grows old before it mourns,

with markets that teach desire

to dress itself as need,

with faces that grow large in glass

as the soul behind them grows small.

The city had clean shop windows

and a soiled gaze.

It knew how to advertise beautifully

what it no longer knew how to love.

It knew how to speak of man

in high language,

but no longer knew how to approach a child

who was asking for nothing.

Rain fell.

Not the rain that washes streets.

Not the rain that gives trees a new scent.

Another rain fell,

lower,

more inward,

upon our polished reasons,

upon our polite fear,

upon our well-dressed shame,

upon the knowledge we had gathered

without yet learning

how not to humiliate the weak

even when we meant to help them.

The child did not get wet.

Not because the rain did not touch him,

but because there are pains

that no longer live in the skin.

He had crossed into that side of man

where insult arrives late,

where consolation stands small,

where the word “mercy”

must lower its head

before entering.

From there the psalm asks for no voice.

Not in the halls where man is named above

and forgotten below.

Not in the applause a time gives itself

when it is no longer able to weep.

It stays where someone, with no power to win,

refuses to become cruel.

Where a woman swallows the heavy word

so the child will not receive it as inheritance.

Where a man comes home broken

and does not use the house

to scatter what broke in him.

Where a poor man passes by something

he could easily take,

and does not touch it.

Do not call this weakness.

There are people who do not take revenge

not because their wounds are small,

but because they do not want to give pain

the right to rule.

Resentment is a second captivity.

It comes after the blow

and asks for shelter inside you.

It gives you the tongue of the one who hurt you,

it gives you his eyes,

it gives you his impatience,

and one day you understand

that the enemy, long since gone,

has begun to speak

from inside your own mouth.

I do not want to build my life

with the stones that were thrown at me.

I have lost.

I do not say this to crown loss.

There are low losses,

there are falls with no nobility,

there are surrenders that deserve no song.

But there are also losses

that save a person

from the wrong victory.

There are chances a man must not take,

because they open only when you let yourself

become smaller than your soul.

There are places where silence is rewarded,

but a man rises from them

with a stain

no one can see,

and therefore no one can ever wash away.

I have come out of some of them.

With no angels on my shoulders.

With no song.

With no certainty that I did right.

Only with that old shame

that appears to a man at his lowest hour

and says to him:

do not take this,

because if you take it,

you will not have won it,

it will have taken you.

Man was not made for escape.

This is not a punishment.

It is the earth’s first claim on him,

that he should not leave the ground

whenever the ground becomes difficult.

He must remain here,

among mud, beauty, blood, fear, the child, the law,

and still not come to resemble the mud.

Somewhere beneath the ribs

there is a small place

where the good does not sit as ornament.

It sits as an obstacle.

As a pain that will not let you pass.

As a memory without an image

that stops you exactly when no one can see you.

A person does not become pure.

He only stops,

one moment before the stain,

and that moment

carries more than many victories.

Not the great salvation.

Not the name.

Not the high place.

Not the bronze memory cooling in public squares.

It is enough that one person

did not use his wound as permission to hate.

It is enough that one hungry man

did not shame someone hungrier than himself.

It is enough that one child,

for one more day,

did not learn humiliation as a language.

They do not hold the world by name.

They hold it unseen,

with the shoulder that does not complain,

with broken sleep,

with the debt paid without witnesses,

with the word that was not used to harm,

with the mercy that does not shame the one

upon whom it falls.

Not where man is written with a capital letter

and treated with a small heart.

Not where freedom is proclaimed daily

while the soul is tied to fear, to the market,

to the crowd, to the screen,

to the need to be seen

more than to be.

Someone can lower another

and does not.

That is all.

No more.

Not to give hatred your body.

Not to call wisdom

what is only fear well dressed.

Do not take this as a call.

Calls ask for crowds.

Take it as breath

that refused to close.

When your lowest hour comes,

will you resemble the wound,

or that which refused to die inside it?

In the end there will be no applause.

There may be only one person

who came out of the day

with less poison than he carried at the start.

A child who, somewhere,

did not learn humiliation as a language.

A loss that did not become a curse.

A body that did not flee the earth

and did not crawl.

And if this is enough only for one day,

let it be one day.

Because there are days

when not becoming cruel

is the highest prayer

left to man.

Arian Galdini