Touch

You are already
asleep. I lower
myself in next to
you, my skin slightly
numb with the restraint
of habits, the patina of
self, the black frost
of outsideness, so that even
unclothed, it is
a resilient chilly
hardness, a superficially
malleable, dead
rubbery texture.

You are a mound
of bedclothes, where the cat
in sleep braces
its paws against your
calf through the blankets,
and kneads each paw in turn.

Meanwhile and slowly
I feel a is it
my own warmth surfacing or
the ferment of your whole
body that in darkness beneath
the cover is stealing
bit by bit to break
down that chill.

You turn and
hold me tightly, do
you know who
I am or am I
your mother or
the nearest human being to
hold on to in a
dreamed pogrom.

What I, now loosened,
sink into is an old
big place, it is
there already, for
you are already
there, and the cat
got there before you,
it is hard to locate.
What is more, the place is
not found but seeps
from our touch in
continuous creation, dark
enclosing cocoon round
ourselves alone, dark
wide realm where we
walk with everyone.
(Thom Gunn)

The unbearable lightness of being

After having spent the past 2 weeks and hours on end in front of a cinema screen opening windows to a world, heimlich or unheimlich, structured or fragmented, it is hard to go back to the ordinary every day life. The curtain is down for the 8th Olympia International Film Festival for Children and Young People and we are already planning for the 9th!! The kids going about and thinking about what films they can make while we are still humming to the beat of the past 2 weeks, our feet still dancing to the music! Ωστόσο... glimpses into the different worlds, the different people, but still, people none the less, opened before our eyes have made us better individuals. And the taste of this remains till, a year from now, the curtain will rise again, and we'll start breathing the fresh air of creation for yet once more. For a while, we stepped into other people's lives, ordinary and extraordinary and emerged to the surface in the Aristotelian sense. Catharsis...