LONG LISTED FOR THE 2023 GRIFFIN POETRY AWARDS
Helen, of course, is married. Her and her husband
fell in love
those great discovering years among the buzz
of the rifles,
the songs and visions, years more passionate than
lovemaking,
serious and brave like friendship, when you would
find the concern of your mother in the touch
of every face
when she would wake up in the night and come
in her tiptoes to check if you were covered. And
Helen remembers that incurable nostalgia she felt
since her childhood; a tyrannizing wish to escape:
from where, to go where? She didn’t know.
A nervous excitement that kept her constantly
above the daily affairs
like a woman who in her erotic oestrus is lifted
by the wind over the bed-sheets, almost in the air
and suddenly flies away from your arms; that erotic
oestrus that narrated adventures and glories,
characteristic case of megalomania, you could say.
For this reason her face was so beautiful, flooded
by the lights
of distant, unbelievable fates. The others smiled
yet in those ironic smiles Helen saw their banality
always imprisoned in the possible. Then, those
years came
the years beyond our most crazy dreams and Helen
never narrated anything anymore.
Libros Libertad 