CVETKA BEVC: AND YET I AM
Guidance for Young Poets (from the series Letters of an Old Poet)
You do not need silence to hear my voice.
In the midst of tempestuous thoughts, I will come to you
like an echo of iron-clad irrefutability.
You will have to fight your way through the twilight of all that is
uttered, written, read,
plunge into the conspiracies of the sea
and lie among the incantations of birds,
to discover a chamber filled with sand,
where I wrote my first word as a child.
One day, you will have to build your own tower out of it.
Let this be the guidance you ask of me,
when you are slaying the night like a pesky mosquito
and you are trying to satiate your hunger with the contents of a can,
on which a photograph of an old poet is pasted.
Go on, break the lock on the door already,
rob the words of their names,
so you can smell the rapture of the stones,
and gift them their existence.
Come on, vanquish the thought of defeats from your mind,
this confection of demons that want to rip out the heart of the poet
when they remove the veil fromletters.
Do not fret. Demons never risk their own skins.
They cannot follow you across the wavering edge of the dark sky.
And there, words make love even in the cold embrace of the clouds.
But you know that. Like me, you will swim underground,
so you will know how to walk on peaks. Our shoes must be
wounded like the sea that swallowed Icarus.
There is no other way out.
