Do you know God?

Francesca Cricelli

Esja shelters an entire city

as no one else does

as nothing else does

it shelters

you say

it shields us from the biting wind

but there are days when the wind goes around and across

it goes beyond the rocky wall it comes from the sea

it comes and it cuts the face

it comes and brings salt to the lips

a slow defrost may never be seen at the horizon the sky is milky and low it grows like grass over our heads

I can’t reach its aerial roots I can’t undo the whiteness with my fingers its colorless nature weights upon my chest

my eyes are like fish hooks and his eyes are wells of salt and honey

behind the blueberries wells of salt and honey he loves his lover and loves her absence as he loves God

he asks me do you know God?

but if I don’t believe, how would I know ?

do you?

I know you can’t undo the pain there is no possible Penelope

no reverse yarn

but what if we deposed our shields what if we stormed again?

wings grow within me like those carried by the birds in Iceland bluish feathers that spring inward from the scapula they say it takes the flight to entangle faith

Francesca Cricelli is a poet, translator and scholar. She was brought up between Brazil, Italy and Malaysia. She has published the book of poems Repátria in Brazil and Italy (Selo Demônio Negro, 2015 e Carta Canta, 2017) and 16 poemas + 1 in the USA (self published, 2017), in Iceland (Sagarana forlag, 2017) and in China (Minsheng Museum, 2018), and a new bilingual chapbook As curvas negras da terra / Las curvas negras de la tierra (Nosotros Editorial, 2019). Her travel chronicles have been published together with a short self-fiction piece Errância, originally published under the Cartonero project of Dulcinéia Catadora (2018) and later by Edições Macondo e Sagarana forlag (2019). She has taken part in many international festivals, among them the Printemps Littéraire Brésilien in 2019 joining the program in Cologne and Zurich. She has translated numerous Italian women writers into Portuguese such as Elena Ferrante (Biblioteca Azul, 2016) Igiaba Scego (Nós, 2018), as well as the British born American raised writer Jhumpa Lahiri (Globo Livros, to be announced) and is currently working on a new translation of Fernando Pessoa into Italian (Interno Poesia). She holds a PhD from the University of São Paulo on Literature & Translation, her thesis focused on Translation and Italian Literature following the discovery of Giuseppe Ungaretti’s love letters to Bruna Bianco. She currently lives in Reykjavík, Iceland.