Old words, new worlds

Since the beginning of the month I haven't done much beyond working and reading my old writings, starting in 1987. I was shocked to realise how much I'd written - in poem form, which always makes me feel slightly ridiculous because poets are giants and, well, I'm just me. It is astonishing to watch my progression as time goes by and to revisit all that teenagey angst and existential doubt. I was 16 when I wrote the first ones, God, was I young! 

Yesterday I foraged in my backup email a bit further and realised I also had a lot of English ones, I actually had things from 1988. I absolutely didn't remember my love fest with English had started that early. I found things I'd forgotten I'd written and loved, and others I have no memory of ever writing at all.

Above all, I feel grateful. 

I have a newly-found need for music and am finding out I enjoy things I never dreamt I could. And I have my words in Portuguese back - am writing again in Portuguese, loads, I hadn't done that regularly since 1994. I have others' words in Portuguese too. You know, I mostly read in English because I preferentially read SciFi, thrillers and good chick lit. We certainly don't have any of those and it is unthinkable to me to read a translated book so English it is. And then there's this blog and my Anglo friends and my often thinking in English anyway and the very relevant fact that I stopped reading poetry ages ago because it made me feel and think at a time when I was trying not to feel and think about a lot of things. Only now, after going back to my old books, after finding these feathered new words that perch in my soul, do I fully realise how much I'd missed it, my mother tongue.

Languages, due to their internal nature, inherently shape how we think. It's not that I have been thinking less for doing it in English mostly (I think as I write, I know what I am feeling through writing, not the other way around) but my thinking... radius, I suppose, has been somewhat limited because of it.

I did create two new blogs for those words, old and new, in a different form (I still can't call them poems) and I now feel completely naked, completely raw, completely overexposed and absolutely, miraculously, unexpectedly expanded. Not sure I can share them - yet? - but I can share this, one of the Oh-I-Wrote-This? 

If you slowly move

Your fingers

Against my bottom lip

As I look up

Averting my eyes

You will feel the trembling

That’s the sound

Of the universe

Coming home

There seems to be more of me now, in all directions. It's a radiant thing.