Poem: The threshold!

By Arian Galdini

There comes a point when the good

does not lift you out of solitude,

but leads you into it,

as a river to its gorge,

when no fields remain

where it can widen,

and it must enter stone.

There, voices fall silent.

The hand that kept you

inside the known falls away.

The face that remained beside you

as long as you asked nothing of the truth,

it too falls away.

Even the life you built

like a house made with care

comes down,

when a single winter

teaches it

it was never made

to hold the snow.

And you remain at the threshold,

stripped down to that core

that will not be sold,

when fear offers you shelter,

when longing kindles an old light,

when the hands of yesterday

recognize your name in the dark.

The threshold does not divide two times.

It divides two breaths.

What has been

can no longer breathe

inside what is to come.

On one side stands yesterday,

with its beloved face,

with the voice that knows how to call you,

with the warmth that keeps you behind.

On the other side

breathes what has not yet arrived.

That is why you cannot carry with you

the dead you love

into the bed

where the unborn child waits.

So begins the harder road.

Not with a hymn.

Not with victory.

But with the burial of what you were

when you still needed the crowd

to hear yourself.

The one to come

cannot breathe

through what you keep.

It rises

from what you cover with your own hands,

until from that loss

the one who walks

rises at last

with no roof but the sky,

with silence behind him,

with nothing left

to turn him back,

and still

leaves one light burning.

Arian Galdini