Europa Nostra, and: Letters from the Sea, and: :3

Europa Nostra

Now that we are guests in our bodies, how do we survive?Zainab operated a boat to be close to the hundredand three members of her family who drowned.Bassem learned to speak a language with another alphabet.Atiq gathered feathers from trembling snow.Bekim carried splintered glass across a hundred mountains.Bina stole prayers from forgotten bodies.Saba held the sound of the drums as if it were breaths.Chinelo kept the sun in a folded leaf under a mattress.Roya kept the shadow of the Caspian Sea in the man who needed her.Mykola dreamed a mystery turned cruel by another dream.Maybe the past is the beginning and return is staying absent.Meanwhile, when anyone says toughen up,look at them until they fade.

Letters from the Sea ~ Lettere dal mare

Aequam memento rebus in arduis servare mentem.Remember when life's path is steep to keep your mind even.

—Horace

He told me my skin was soft, placed his body inside, as if his thoughts weren't loud, as if his sins weren't a tapestry of unbearable echoes, as if his sentences weren't an end to nowhere, as if it wasn't difficult to die.

~

Carry me into another name. Take my lips by the seagulls, take my body to the mist we once found mercy in, to the roar that split us in half, and then reassemble me like a still world.

~

The July-blue sky opened beneath our hearts. The birds were absent. The ships were empty. The bullets drowning us. The uniforms like a country that's forgotten the rules of swimming. What hadn't we told each other? Where had we gone without digging into love as if it were eternal water?

~

Sailing down my back were the words you learned in the dark one night; under the thundered skies sentences are slight shifting stars, empty heavens, unsettled fogs; the horizon isn't close, neither are the splendid suns or the names crushed into my body like questions we once asked but didn't want an answer for—

~

The sea is a quake of hours, so remember that long summer where you saw the moon split into gods.

~

We carried death on the waves, and didn't feel the weight of our woe.

Alex Majoli, Scene #0410, The Theatricality of Life series. Lesbos, Greece Moria refugee camp (2015). Photography. (© Alex Majoli | Magnum Photos)

~

And the years are away, and the silences are entrances, and the darkness
another distance, and,

~

Death is a misty prayer between two unmoved words.

~

I no longer know where you are, the sea softened after the storm,
I can tell no one what I know.

:3

Un posto ci sarà per questa solitudine

From a place where memory is a reservoir. From an old wound. A war. From a room of fantasies. From the faint voice of pleasure. From the view of our naked bodies. From the road that leads to mirrors. From the mirrors that lead to hums. From the pleasure we unlearned, and learned late again. From this rhythm we keep. From this passion we endure. From this mystery that tells us we lost everything in a one room, and found we belonged somewhere after all.

Un posto ci sarà per essere felici

Why find out who we are? Why remember all we did? Why think of what changed us? Why think of what challenged us; what kept us away from what we began? When a heart empties a gaze. When a memory turns on another memory, which of your voices is mine? Only mine. We slip through each other as if the cities we came from meant nothing to the world.

Un posto ci sarà dove si spera ancora la gente porterà una storia nova

When we are lonely, the city opens itself to remind us no one is alone, all the time, and then the wind delivers a day, light moves to make space for nameless friends, a saint tells us...