maybe..

I was taking a photo of the window.. and someone appeared taking the photo of who knows whose soul..
The photo of a photo.. the soul taking a soul.. taking a soul…
I wondered, without an answer.
Like at the insomnia nights…
Like the endless remembrances that appear, as hidden thieves, and instead of stealing they give us a present: a feeling of melancholy..
For the times deeply lived and gone but also for the times to come.. maybe.
And that “maybe” makes the whole difference…

a touch of mighty Venus..

Walking along those empty, narrow streets, under a thin rain, he had felt a presence following him... penetrating deep inside his thoughts... intense.
Erice, a city full of history. Myths, ghosts coming from immemorial ages. Where Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans had worshipped goddess Astarte, Aphrodite, Venus.. all different names for same entity: Love's goddess. Where Heracles had been inbetween one of his famous twelve works. Where Aeneas had made his father's funeral and had left some fellows before departing to other lands. One of those fellows had established there.... a priestess of Venus... forbidden love... departures to other lands, beyond the sea... and broken hopes.

He went on walking. He had been at a bar, some minutes before, talking to someone he had just met with the feeling they knew each other from years. They had been there sharing their past, hoping their future... somehow a souls' meeting, or a gentle touch of mighty Venus?
He finally reached the church and the singular tower, the one that had been, in the past, a watching point to see if ships would come near the town. Both buildings had been built with the stones of the old goddess' temple.

Rain had ended... and a soft, persistent fog was pervading all. He stopped for a while. Something at the tower... A noise? Just breeze?
He looked at its top... he felt it again, extremely intense inside his soul...
Shivering, he went on walking, knowing that nothing would be ever the same... nothing!

Driven crazy of eternity..

I let myself be on the Earth because I am the “enjoyer”,
the one that under clouds remains quiet.
I think: if anybody would touch my hands
he would go away, driven crazy of eternity..

Manuel J. Castilla
Salta's poet..

I'm going...

from Argentina Northwest region, an anonymous copla..

I'm going..
I'm leaving,
of your presence
i walk away.
If only as
a memory
My heart to you
I'm giving

my treasures..

"My treasures do not clink together or glitter; They gleam in the sun and neigh in the night."
-Arabian Proverb

Finding the past..

Taken from the boat, while sailing the Nile.. an excavation.
I kept thinking about those ruins. No Egyptian poet came to help me, so, as it was very near Aswan, (and near Sudan border), I chose some verses of a Sudanese poet.. Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi:

Let the maps explode. How can the land be lost
When the future belongs to the Nile?
The Nile knows of the disgrace of cities
That have vanished.
Knows of the old times
Yet never speaks.
It is the Nile…

At the "city of the deads"..

There is a group of vast cemeteries at Cairo that stretches out along the base of the Moqattam Hills
The cemeteries built in the City of the Dead, as it is called, are much different than the western idea of cemeteries.
This is because traditionally, Egyptians buried their dead in room-like “burial sites” so they could live in them during the long mourning period of forty days. .
Among these cemeteries lives a community of Egypt’s urban poor,
“More than five million Egyptian live in these cemeteries, and have formed their own enterprises,” said Malak Yakan, an anthropologist ..

As the great Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz, Nobel Prize of literature, wrote:
"The real malady is fear of life, not of death."