Celebrating Childhood

Even the wind wants to become a cart pulled by butterflies. I remember madness leaning for the first time on the mind’s pillow. I was talking to my body then and my body was an idea I wrote in red. Red is the sun’s most beautiful throne and all the other colors worship on red rugs. Night is another candle. In every branch, an arm, a message carried in space echoed by the body of the wind. The sun insists on dressing itself in fog when it meets me: Am I being scolded by the light? Oh, my past days— they used to walk in their sleep and I used to lean on them. Love and dreams are two parentheses. Between them I place my body and discover the world. Many times I saw the air fly with two grass feet and the road dance with feet made of air. My wishes are flowers staining my days. I was wounded early, and early I learned that wounds made me. I still follow the child who still walks inside me. Now he stands at a staircase made of light searching for a corner to rest in and to read the face of night again. If the moon were a house, my feet would refuse to touch its doorstep. They are taken by dust carrying me to the air of seasons. I walk, one hand in the air, the other caressing tresses that I imagine. A star is also a pebble in the field of space. He alone who is joined to the horizon can build new roads. A moon, an old man, his seat is night and light is his walking stick. What shall I say to the body I abandoned in the rubble of the house in which I was born? No one can narrate my childhood except those stars that flicker above it and that leave footprints on the evening’s path. My childhood is still being born in the palms of a light whose name I do not know and who names me. Out of that river he made a mirror and asked it about his sorrow. He made rain out of his grief and imitated the clouds. Your childhood is a village. You will never cross its boundaries no matter how far you go. His days are lakes, his memories floating bodies. You who are descending from the mountains of the past, how can you climb them again, and why? Time is a door I cannot open. My magic is worn, my chants asleep. I was born in a village, small and secretive like a womb. I never left it. I love the ocean not the shores.