Before you began to exist in me

***

As a face, as a form, as a will,

You were a word,

Which from the depths of my dreams

Gave its voice

To my lyricism,

Awoke

The vague memories of myself

From before my birth –

The memories that don’t correspond

To what I am looking at –

The farthest journey to the unknown.

Not the sea before dawn,

Not the brown backs of the hills,

Not even a trembling hand

At the moment of weakness,

But a distinct shadow of a belief.

You were the word

That wrote my wings,

Its material weight

Pronounced my force

For flight,

For to be,

The height and the depth grew in one:

To fly or to fall meant the same.

Peering into your face now,

I recall the word

That doesn’t exist, I guess,

But brings out my faith in man

And ‘the known world’.

(“Before you began to exist in me

You were already everything” –

making a circle over the sea

with the urtica scarf I’m clothed in).

Drawing “Inizio studio senza soggetto”, by Sara Maino, 2021