translated by Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann

Poetry from NER 42.1 (2021)
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Now, when he is at your side, you discover
that it is a man, still young. 

The same one as the time he proceeded through the corridor
of the bus, an other on the stump of both
knees when you did not understand the jokes his friend was telling
to keep him company. 

That is how they resist: without enchantment. 

That the ant carries a weight a hundred times
greater than its own. 
That the halves of the worm insist on living.
Or the appetite of the lichen, growing upon
the smallest bit of humidity.

They practice forms of heroism that you have no
way of imagining, in mysteries that seem 
transported from another universe. 

And then the disorder, the mutation, 
the accident, reveal a larva closer
to the basic and also to the border. 

In that hardness of grasping: without enchantment.