Like a Witch Disguised as an Owl
Like a Witch Disguised as an Owl
Like a witch disguised as an owl, loneliness deafens us with its wing of clay,
it comes toward us and its tireless claw keeps growing in the dark,
it has been on this earth for ages, a shadow wearing a human face, carried down through centuries,
in general we embrace it quickly, but its fears run too deep for me to hold in my hands,
I don't try to translate them, or tie them to the thin thread of the day.
Accepting its geometric way of slipping through our unfinished sleep,
we perform small rituals with enormous symbols, drawn on the eyelid of night,
and then we hum a nameless melody, torn from some forgotten choir,
I swallow its echo like a hot stone, so it won't disturb me too much,
and I stay silent, waiting for the quiet to grow back from its own ashes.
It carries in its gaze collapsed cathedrals and children who never once cried,
its footsteps are old coins fallen into bottomless, echoless wells,
and its claw, grown from centuries of hunger, digs into the wall between me and the world
a crack through which everything I never said and never wept pours out,
and still I remain here, on its threshold, a silent and doubting witness.
Sometimes I feel it settle on my chest like a bird heavy with melted lead,
I listen to its breathing, steady and cold as the sea beneath winter ice,
and I understand that fear doesn't want to be defeated, only held, like a sick child,
so I sing to it quietly, in a broken voice, a song I don't even know myself,
and it falls asleep a little, just enough for me to breathe in turn.
And maybe this strange stillness is the only prayer we have left,
a wordless dialogue between fear and the body that still wants to exist,
a witch and a man, seated on the same step of the same endless night,
each humming the same echo, each in his own silent tongue,
until dawn comes and turns it, if only for a moment, into ordinary light.
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