Ankica Anchie - Poem
Moderator 
NAMELESS
It’s not that I forgot.
Memory simply returns sometimes as a scent-
without a name, without a voice.
Just silence, slowly becoming everything.
Like a morning when you don’t rush to rise,
because you are still dreaming someone’s face
and cannot remember whose.
I’ve learned that life gathers itself
in the moments we never spoke about.
Last night I wandered through everything unsaid-
a film looping endlessly, never reaching its end.
I imagined you sitting beside me, speaking.
Or maybe we would remain in that unfinished space,
in a moment that was always ours
but never fully owned.
Silence, I suspect, is only an attempt
to keep what has already vanished.
Who truly ever leaves?
Who stays, except us,
inside old words and thinning air?
I spent the night with the wind.
No voices. No laughter.
I spoke to it about you.
It did not answer-
or perhaps I was the answer.
I once believed I understood the world,
that I could count time,
sort feelings into neat hours.
Now there are only numbers,
and between them hesitation:
me from myself,
you from you.
Even light seems to withdraw
from what can no longer be reached.
I used to think God was male.
Now I’m not sure.
Perhaps God is a woman,
and in the pockets of her coat
sleep all my attempts not to call you.
I wrote you a letter
and never read it.
I wrapped it in verse
and buried it beneath my eyelashes-
because that’s where the heart
returns most often.
Do you remember that song?
The one that smelled of childhood,
of pine resin on your fingers,
of “stay a little longer.”
You were always inside that song.
I simply didn’t know it was a song,
because you were its beginning and its end.
Now I am a city without bridges.
I do not move.
I wait.
Waiting, I’ve learned,
is always closer than it seems.
Some things we cannot retrieve
remain with us anyway-
like a rare book never fully opened.
I fold the morning into my chest,
and even closed,
the story hums.
A melody of absence.
A memory dressed in pine and silence.
Amb. Ankica Anchie, Croatia
Humanist, Poetessa and writer
