by Maria de Araujo
The sun traces lines in shadow
hollows in youth.
A few feet to the right,
it shines on uncarved surfaces
that reflect the light
undiluted.
I fold the colours so I can look at them.
14/8/19
Bent over, my arm reached for days,
I wait for my silent hand to surface.
The God’s mouth is a hollow without darkness,
a familiar pit with different absences.
The wind cries in a language
I can’t recognize,
The sound breaks my grasp
on the strings of my mind.
Feelings are a beach full of sand –
I take each grain and try and
remember where it came from,
each moment
a different rock formation
on a time scale made of recalled tremors.
I confuse them with now –
a place of quietness and unwritten stories,
the place to decide myself and see
that the absences are pressing strata
and I am choosing where to drill.
14/8/19
—
Maria Araújo and her poems were born in Portugal and study in London, moving between nature, mental landscapes, and the female in myth and religion. Her poetry can be read in the Portuguese Piolho Apneia and U.Porto’s JRAAS, and in the upcoming issues of the feminist Frígida (U.Porto) and Grater Expectations (UCL’s Student Union). She’s been scattering, on this and that printed page, a collection imagining the female voices in the New Testament. She studies modernist fiction at the intersection between literary criticism and philosophy of language, and dreams of wo(o)lfs howling about minds.