The Skin of Angels [ENG-PT/BR]
✍️
These photo-poetic essays, presented in the form of diptychs—one color photograph and one black-and-white photograph—are the result of a challenge posed to me by João Maria André (poet, philosopher, theater director, and full professor at the University of Coimbra). You can read more about this challenge, which evolved into an exhibition of the same name, here.
✍️
Behind the crimson that performs desire,
and the night's abyss upon the stage of being,
an angel transforms his body into a cloud
and dreams that the moon wears a woman's face.
✍️
Angels write love poems too,
tracing letters in water on the skin of light.
Yet they cannot taste the words,
for the salt of sweat is a gift reserved for humans.
✍️
This could be the face of my angels,
this skin without skin and these eyes without eyes,
searching for the lines a god once drew
and then forgot at a corner of time.
✍️
Within the creases of the sheet sleep has crumpled,
there is no sweat, no lingering mark of love;
beneath an angel's skin, no fire burns,
and no passion stirs within the satin of their dreams.
✍️
How are angels born in the center of the body?
Is there a thread that connects them to the center of the earth?
It is in the center of the skin that time awakens
And it is in the center of the water that life invents itself.
✍️
It is in the skin of the light that angels love each other
and in the curve of the shoulder of those who contemplate them
only the white is lost in a thread of tenderness
like a vertical sound over the stones of time.
✍️
What angel broke free and opened these handcuffs
and then dressed himself in the skin he did not have?
What angel stripped himself of the life he found,
of the semen he cast in the pain of farewell?
✍️
Angels also die in the bodies of birds
between bombs and fuel and the pain of children.
Only the cold light of the blue in which they fall hurts them
so different from the skin of the sky in which they dance.
! [PORTUGUESE VERSION]
Estes ensaios foto-poéticos, apresentados em forma de dípticos - uma fotografia a cores e outra a preto e branco, é o resultado de um desafio que me foi lançado por João Maria André (poeta, filósofo, encenador de teatro e professor catedrático da Universidade de Coimbra). Sobre este desafio, que evoluiu para uma exposição com o mesmo nome, pode ler mais aqui.
