Baptism Poem by Gemma Gorga

Each evening I read again all the letters
you've never written me and that I keep in transparent
boxes so thieves won't be able to find them
- for how will they see air in air, light in light?
There are many pasts existing in the past, many
memories that ramify like small
capillaries of time. Also memory is everything
we never managed to live, to see, to tell ourselves,
everything that remained lightly adhering
in our hearts, like an eyelash about to fly.
Dead before their birth but, all the same, souls
do no stop being souls. All they need is the cold water
of baptism and someone who knows how to believe in them.

Translated by Julie Wark