Poem: To David and Martin!

By Arian Galdini

You are not being born

into a century that waits.

You are coming

into a time when light arrives faster than wisdom,

when news enters the house

before bread is broken,

when a distant voice

crosses the wall, the glass, the night

and sits down at the table

as if it were family.

So I do not call you

to be calm.

Calm, now,

is often only numbness.

And numbness

is the softest gate

through which loss walks in.

David.

Martin.

Two names

still light on my tongue,

already heavy in time.

Two names

this world

will not always reach you

with the blow,

not always with the cry,

but with that cold light

that enters without knocking

and finds you

where you think

you are safest.

There are shores here

from which nothing returns,

mountains carrying nameless weight,

roads kept open through winter.

A forged face

may teach you sooner

than the face before you in the flesh.

A false voice

may speak to you

as if it were your own blood.

A fear lit far away

reaches you before night.

A war that does not bear your name

enters your blood

through voice, through image, through dread.

One evening,

when the power failed for a while

and the city seemed

stripped of itself,

I saw you both

inside that sudden silence

that makes rare light

heavier than usual.

In that brief dark

faces no longer had screens to lean on,

or the lit windows across from us,

or the endless motion of things.

Only you remained,

your breathing,

a long hallway,

and me.

Martin,

in you movement rose first,

as always.

Not out of fear.

But out of that aliveness

that cannot bear emptiness

without filling it with the body.

David,

in you another order beat,

more hidden,

slower,

as when an unseen hand

sets the soul to listening

before it sets it to act.

Far off,

a thin siren

brushed the city’s air.

Not enough for panic.

Enough for memory.

Enough

for the world to enter our hallway

without knocking.

Martin lifted his head first.

A thin line tightened in his neck.

His eyes went ahead

before his feet

had chosen their direction.

David did not speak.

He only turned a little,

like one who does not trust a noise at once,

but gives himself

half a moment

not to become noise as well.

Then

it was no longer about darkness.

Or the siren.

Or the outage.

Martin,

at your temple

a thin vein rose.

David,

in you silence beat

before voice.

And in that hallway

the father was not there

to take the world away from you.

He stayed.

One day

there will stand before you

faces that ask for submission

not by command,

but by a smile.

Voices that ask for the soul

not by a cry,

but by nearness.

Lights that do not blind you at once,

but slowly teach you

to lose the difference

between glare and light.

David.

Martin.

Weight.

When the age comes into your hands

with its false light,

its freedom that does not hold,

its anger begging for a body,

salvation lies

in the hand that stops

before harm.

And if one day

everything around you trembles,

the voice,

the city,

time,

the light,

the world itself,

then become those

after whom

the earth is left a little heavier…

Arian Galdini