***
On the wide windowsill,
I marvelled at the Great Wall –
The border of the forest.
Who would I have been
If I were not to see
The trunks of those birches?
They started living
Long before me.
Each of them – a book,
A sonic story.
I put my thoughts away
And listen for what no human voice
Can tell –
Claude Debussy
Or Shostakovich…
Woods are like the sea,
Immense for anything but music –
To be inhaled or just to be,
To be or not to be, to be unpolished.
On windowsills
I tune my ears to The Old Oak,
Four centuries of will,
Four centuries of pain and rains,
Right in the depths of Momignies forests.
The oak appeared from the earth
Four centuries ago,
Amid the Little Ice Age,
A time characterised by harsh and long,
And freezing winters in the Europe’s domus.
The Oak was born when Bruegel
Was paintings his “Hunters in the Snow”,
On which the folk enjoyed ice-skating on the lakes,
While hunters wore the fur-coats.
The oak escaped the axes of the men
During the wartime, when his sisters
Fell to be the bridges,
And Only he, who has survived,
A creature, tall and free,
Who stands by me
On winter evenings, summer mornings,
spring, autumn, always…
