Warsaw

“Since they’d never met before, they’re sure
that there’d been nothing between them.
But what’s the word from the streets, staircases, hallways—
perhaps they’ve passed by each other a million times?”

Love at First Sight, Wislawa Szymborska

“And if what is of earth forgets you,
Say to that earth of silence: I flow.
Say to the rushing waters: I am.”

The Sonnets to Orpheus, Rainer María Rilke

We, who walk around this world, believe that everything vibrates from our inner space, and sings.

A candle lit in that particular spot where we expected to find nothing, the furtive motion of a hand hiding a sultry handkerchief in its palm, a door being closed, the water in a glass that someone implored thirsty and then forgot to drink, the eyes and the lips that smile their devotion at an absent voice, the emptiness of a swing still swaying back and forth under the crown of a tree, the full moon lying back on the Western sky. A face and its vague reflection on the window pane.

As if there were no frontiers between the spirit of things that gravitate towards our experience, and the extension of the most intimate substance of our constitution.

Much, of all that Warsaw was six months ago, could have given me the hint of any melody of mine. Though nothing even spoke to me of anything but a muffled gray whisper of stones. Except, at a square (Adama Mickiewicza), at dusk (when goodbyes are the saddest):

A boy and his truest singing in the air.

An unsuspected happiness invaded me then: in that haven of twilight, my remembrance of you was forever fading. You were beginning to inhabit me and expand the spaces of my breadth. Above the silence of every possible world, my new song was raising.

Before visiting Warsaw, do not forget to read the magnificent legend regarding its foundation and, of course, to listen to Chopin’s Romance larghetto or his Nocturne op.9 No.2.  😉