Moments and fragments
There are times for frustration.
For the glory of the fleeting.
For adolescent frivolity.
And there are times of despair,
of walking barefoot through the streets
whilst the cities spit out the corpses
of people who are still breathing.
There are times of despair
when Grandmother has swapped her recipes
for queues of hunger.
And there is a hunger that never ends,
which began with a redundancy,
with a casual ‘we’ll be in touch’
and with an ever unsettling ‘don’t worry’.
The pain clings to the lungs
until it rips out
the last remaining oxygen.
The suicidal person takes his own life with the desert’s last flower
and its thorns.
There are clouds of pepper and hemlock.
We inhale those clouds,
and they inoculate us with the sap of dead trees.
There are times of despair,
with no staves for hymns,
no tablecloths on the tables.
With synesthetic eyes behind the ubiquitous masks.
We walk barefoot through the streets,
rummaging through the rubbish, the only solid entity
in a liquid environment.
The ponds have dried up, and the tears have filled with stagnant water
They fall slowly.
Slowly.
Slowly.
And in the depths of the night, pain finds no language:
silence swells around the bonfires
and ‘every man for himself’ is no longer a rallying cry.
About the Author
Natalia Fernández Díaz-Cabal is a polyglot, translator, lecturer, nomad, international speaker, entomologist of words, inveterate cultivator of curiosity, stubbornly self-taught visual artist and poet. She is a Ph.D. in Linguistics and Ph.D. in Philosophy of science. She has delivered lectures, seminars, recitals and courses in more than 15 countries in Europe, America, Asia and Africa. She has also authored several books of poetry.
