When I woke up today, I couldn't but feel the weariness of too much rushed work done in the last days. Paperwork piles up on my table. It is the advanced payment that one has to go through to have projects up and running in the future, I say to myself. It is a way of convincing myself that it was worth to postpone for some days fully enjoying the first days of spring here.
It is enough, however, to look through my window, and see the old Mediterranean sparkling with the first light of the morning for all the fatigue to go away. I am a very fortunate person.
It is difficult to convey what one feels in these moments. A cup of coffee on the table, at hand, the bittersweet taste of the first sips still alive in my mouth. My memory plays with images from old readings. It ends up mixing two poems where morning, coffee, sails, sea, and blue skies dance together. Too lazy and lacking the skills to create my own I paste here verses from one and the other. They are appropriate even if I see no kids delivering the morning newspaper as Carver did and I am definitely not plucking weeds from my garden as Milosz was.
So early it's still almost dark out.
I'm near the window with coffee,
and the usual early morning stuff
that passes for thought.[...]
Such beauty that for a minute
death and ambition, even love,
doesn't enter into this.
Happiness. It comes on
unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,
any early morning talk about it.
"A day so happy.
Fog lifted early. I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over the honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw blue sea and sails."
But I cannot keep thinking that my luck is to be on this shore of this old sea. My thoughts go to the other shores too, to the good and bad things happening there right now, the suffering and the injustice that boil there.
As I said, I am a very fortunate person. Hope sometime, someone on the other shore, looking through a window as I am doing now again feels like I am feeling on this one, this morning.
Recent Comments