Téssera (excerpt)

--Nathalie Handal

I look at the way this silence

moves the streets,

the way we leave ourselves

in others,

the way our shadows

come back for more solitude,

the way death holds

death hostage

even when it begs

to walk down the lonesome road.

Maybe we need

to empty our souls

to find those

thinking of us

in memories we forgot,

maybe we will see

darkness healing

as ships land on pale shores,

or maybe we will fall into the sea,

forgetting that love

is a longer voyage

than life.