The Key

Suddenly we had nowhere to live and everything was changed. My mother got a job pressing other people's trousers. Meanwhile I was kept at grandmothers'. One rainsoaked day my mother held me by the hand on her way back home from work. She walked slowly in the middle of the muddy road and looked intently into the dirt. I spoke to her. She didn't answer. I asked her questions or told her about my day, but she was distant and showed no interest in what I had to say. My hand firmly in hers. That sufficed me; I fell silent. Finally she caught her breath and said, as if to herself: 'There it is!' She stopped, bent down and picked up our key, where it lay washed by the rain, pale and shining in the mud.

The Place

was always halfway between reality and dream. When I first came here there was a calm after rain and a dream-like mist hanging in the air over the lava field and the moss had an eerie greenish hue. The streets were red and wound their way through the petrified turmoil of the lava. The houses were either pearched on top of the rises or had been found shelter in the hollows and each house turned its own way. This was the edge of the lava, the edge of habitation ... so people had begun settling the lava. The past was about to disappear under the tread of a new time just as the fields had disappeared under the burning lava. And the lava had pushed the land out into the sea and created a safe haven for seafarers from distant lands. This was a world verging on everything, at the edge of all things. This was where fire met with frost, this was where the dry kissed the wet, vegetation the emptiness, settlement the wilderness. And above all this was where the land met other lands, giving them oil for their lamps and stories for their hearths. It was here that Columbus came ashore for legends and tales of a new world, a new world beyond an unknown ocean. It was from here that he sailed with his conjectures strengthened, intuition traded for certainty. Here, at this meeting place of contrasts, poetry is born because poetry resolves contrasts, and shatters false integrity.