Cold

Poetry cannot be the same, despite the present, which keeps the flavour of its eternity. The cold has set in, and the air remains humid. Our skins have not yet learned to close their pores. We shiver to walk. We tell ourselves that we must replace the autumn coat with something more suitable.

Some dead leaves still seem to have a little breath, but the others are well and truly ossified and fragmented. Some plants resist, but snow and ice will eventually swallow them.

Our ear is not designed to hear them. They may moan, but I doubt it. Their roots remain alive and sound, wrapped in the ground, overwintering and docile, waiting for a better solar obliquity.

The people of the North are usually tough and know how to deal with the season. The pandemic, this other winter, has undoubtedly weakened them. It is said that suicides, failed or successful, are increasing. Souls are fragile, after all, in winter because it is challenging to deal with the hours when they can only be counted within four walls of caution.

There are certainly greater miseries on the planet. Volcanoes explode on straw huts; dictators slit the throats of those who are too loud, bigots lynch or burn supposed infidels.

On the other hand, there are constant happinesses, people who love each other, hearts that strut, people who dance, who sing obstinately.

We only know the cold because we remember the heat. Our happiness belongs to our visions and perceptions. The challenge of this human species is to build a unison with respect to the rest of the universe. Why do we seem so far from the answers we once shared with birds and dinosaurs?

Everything can be a subject for philosophizing. I don’t need the cold to force me to do so. My breath, my roots, is holding on, waiting for a simpler light.