Before the Beginning (— in the vacuum's dance) cycle of creation
Author: D’Bara Arruda

(Vacuum: the silence that swallowed
the first name of God...) the truths of untruth.

I already loved you before the boom of the Big Bang —
when fire was just a moan
in the throat of nothing,
and time — a dark womb
awaiting its first tremor.

Your scent existed
before air learned to flow.
I smelled it — primordial mist —
among atoms that had not yet
dreamt of becoming stars.

My veins are tardy maps
of a river that already ran through me
before it had a bed.
It bled without wound,
a fervour without form,
while the cosmos spun
its mill of silence.

Now I see you:
not with eyes, but with the mark
you leave in the chest of the universe —
where light hesitates...

(...light hesitates.
And then —
ah, cosmos!
— premature twilight
riding a comet,
because it
refused to wait for the end of days?)

And now we are here,
beneath the decline of light,
as darkness feeds
the machine that grinds existences.
— Dear Death, take a seat:
I brought bread from the wheat of comets
and wine from the sweat of stars
spat out by black holes in the final collapse —
a last sip before nothingness.

We spoke of the first star that died
and the last grain of dust
that will remain.
I leave, between the lines,
the minor tone of my dismantled clock
on the table of my last hours
as forgiveness —
the sarcasm of the atemporal tick-tock
of the subconscious.

While outside,
the vacuum dances
its infinite ballet
with the remnants of creation.

Here explodes my poetic self
that forced the Universe to tear itself open
to contain it —
dreams like water springing forth
and flooding the maps astrologers
drew on the skins of angels.
An epilogue that overflows
knowledge into the bed of the inexplicable.
And for love, eloquently,
you created what the blind
(...call an error in the mathematics
God scratched and the vacuum swallowed.)