Scarlet River

Laura Carapeto, a graduate in Philosophy and Journalism, presents us with
another literary craft: a poem. The lyrical I discovers an inner freedom
inner freedom by which it is constituted. This freedom, it seems,
also has a colour.
 

Not everything flows. Not everything passes.
Only that which
you want to give the floor, 
what you give yourself to licence 
to embody,
only that which you want to be touched, 
to goal to the depths 
the darkest parts of your intimacy.
That's all.
It alone changes you. It speaks to you.
The rest, well, it's just words. 

Let it bite you,
Do you feel it?
It's everything you gave importance to,
it's part of you, of your flesh,
of your skin, of your entrails.
You see, you don't let yourself.
They are those words that ask
to be kept, not torn away.

Thank you for letting me climb
on your eyelashes.
Air. Abyss.
If you only knew how far you are
from all that dump,
for which you suffer, for which you fret!
If you only knew how far you are
from what is happening to you.
That you are not your action, nor your mountains.
That you are the air that oxygenates my soul.

You feel fear, anguish.
Of what.

Of the unknown.
Let me tell you that this is your
your greatest treasure: to know you are small,
and pierced. Reached.

Fear of being vulnerable,
of not knowing how to hold the reins.
It doesn't matter, you will learn.
And if you don't, don't worry, it will stop
will stop mattering, because all those things
those things will no longer be strange, they will be
wounds, battle decorations.

You are a scarlet river.
Red, yes. Does it scare you?

I will only tell you that it is the colour of death,
of passion and of life.
Of your own blood, the one you don't value
and that you shouldn't let it
die in your veins.

Live, because everything is red, but
you have enough red inside you
to choose what you want it to become
to become
death, past, life, present or blood,
scarlet blood.