Poem of the Child

For the divine child who lives inside each one of us. May he/she always tell us stories. Merry Christmas!

Poema do Menino Jesus (Fernando Pessoa)

At noon, on a Spring day I had a dream, just like a photograph:
I saw Jesus Christ descend to Earth .
He ran down a hill, but He was a boy again running and rolling in the grass
Picking flowers and laughing so hard, that you could hear Him far away.
He had escaped Heaven.
He was ours, so much ours, to pretend to be the Second Person of the Trinity.
One day that God was sleeping and the Holy Ghost was flying around, He went to the box of miracles, And stole three of them:
With the first He made no one notice He had escaped; with the second He created Himself eternally human and child; and with the third He created a Christ eternally in the cross and left him nailed in the cross to serve as a model to the other ones .
Then He fled to the Sun and came down on the first sunbeam He was able to catch. Nowadays He lives in my village, with me.
He´s a beautiful child, with a natural smile.
He wipes His nose with His right arm, jumps in the puddles, picks flowers- He likes them- forgets things. throws stones, picks fruit in the orchards and runs away from the dogs.
Just because He knows they don´t like it, and everybody laughs at that, He runs after the girls who carry jugs on their head and pulls up their skirts.

To me, He taught me everything.
He taught me how to look at things.
He shows me all the colors there are in the flowers and shows me how pebbles can be funny when we have them in our hands and carefully look at them.
We get along so well, with everything, that we never think about each other.
We live, both of us, in a close agreement, like the right hand and the left hand.
When it starts to grow dark, we play the five little rocks on my doorstep. Very seriously, as it suits to a GOD and a poet. As if each little rock were the whole Universe and it would be very dangerous to let it fall.
Then I tell Him stories about humankind. And He smiles, because they are all incredible. He laughs at the kings and at the ones who are not kings. And He´s sorry to hear about the wars and the greed.
After that He falls asleep and I carry Him in my arms to my home, I lay Him in my bed, in a ritual, all human and all motherly.
He sleeps inside my soul.
Sometimes He wakes up in the middle of the night, plays with my dreams. Turns some of them upside down, piles them up, and claps, alone, smiling at my dreams.

When I die, Little Son, I´ll be the child, the littlest one. You´ll carry me in Your arms, take me to Your home. lay me down in Your bed, to sleep. Undress my being, tired and human. Tell me stories in case I wake up, so that I go back to sleep, and give me Your dreams – to play.

Growing Up

In the first pages of Peter Pan, by J.M. Barrie, Wendy, then two years old, brings a flower to her mother . Mrs Darling “put her hand to her heart and cried, ‘Oh, why can´t you remain like this forever!’ “ Hearing this, Wendy understood that she had to grow up. Barrie continues by saying that “two is the beginning of the end” and that (and this tells a lot about mothers and daughters) “Of course they lived at 14, and until Wendy came her mother was the chief one”.
Is it really a loving thing to say to a child, oh you´ll always be a child to me ? I don´t think so. I think we should tell our children “I´ll always love you, no matter what” , and that´s a completely different thing. When parents tell their children they will always be children, what they really mean is “ you´ll never outshine me. I´ll be the chief one, always.” They´re afraid of the painful and inevitable little deaths we go through every day in parenthood.
As I write this, my five –year –old (almost, almost six, according to herself) daughter is in a school excursion in a Farm Hotel 200 km away from here. They left early in the morning and will be back tomorrow evening.


She has always been very independent, that one. In her first day of school (she was two) , I arrived with her at the school gate and when we were crossing it she turned to me and said “Go home, mom”. Of course I didn´t go home immediately. I stayed there for a little while in case she “needed me”, but then realized I was obviously not needed, and came home. I thought it was going to be like her brother´s first months of school, that I had to be there all the time. Her brother had spoiled me.
When the trip permit came in her notebook I asked her if she wanted to go. I was expecting her to be at least hesitant, but no. I got an “of course” fired straight at me… Yesterday, when I went to help her pack, to my surprise she had managed to read a few items of the packing list sent by the school and had already separated them. I feel a mixture of pride and anxiety. I´m really proud of this beautiful little project of woman I´m raising and I´m proud of my ten-year-old boy, who told me this morning: don´t worry mom, I´ll be there with her. And I´m anxious because I don´t want them to grow before their time.
All in all, in these past few days I realized that the only certain thing I can give those two is my love in many ways. It´s imprinted in them and they´ll carry it wherever they go. All else will be up to them.

Words

Some things are better left unsaid. Really? And what do you do with them, since they cannot be left unfelt? Where do they go? To the same place as Broken Dreams and Missed Opportunities? Where is it? I know where it is, but I don´t think there´s enough room any longer.
Countless times the words stop in my throat, and go back in. And they stay there, mocking me for not being brave enough to have said them. Words can be quite scary. Glances and gestures many times give you the benefit of the doubt, but not loud and clear words. And once they are out, they cannot be taken in again.
The written word is no different. Poems and stories are like people. Once you´ve met them, even in a brief encounter, they´re there forever. When you think they´ve disappeared, they pop out of nowhere in your dreams, in a song, in a stranger´s face.
I have a deep respect for stories. There are books and movies in my shelves waiting to be read or seen, and still, I haven´t found the courage to do so. I want them, but I fear the change their words might cause. Crazy, I know. As Paul Auster said in a recent interview, […]clarity, I think, is the most unsettling thing possible. It allows the reader, in some sense, if you can do it well, ideally to forget that the medium of expression is language. You´re just somehow in what the words are saying. You´re not even thinking about the words anymore.[…] . If that can be achieved, then the story becomes part of you. It enters your mind and soul and finds a place to stay. That can be unsettling, but it is part of the experience of being alive.
At the same time, there are poems and stories I go back to frequently, because they resonate inside of me. They´re comfortable, and have a face I like to look at. They keep me alive, also, but in a different way.
These days I want to say and hear the unsaid . What is kept in that labyrinthian and misty place within my heart.