“Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar
There are days when writing ceases to be a solitary act and becomes a bridge.
One always writes with the quiet hope of reaching as far as possible, but with time one learns that literature without readers is motionless language, a body without breath. Poetry does not live in the one who writes it; it lives in the one who reads it and recognizes themselves.
I write, and that is all.
I write: I give only half of the poem.
The other half happens in silence, when someone—far away, unknown—enters the text and turns it into experience. We do not read others; we read ourselves in them. And in that small, almost miraculous gesture, a stranger sees themselves in a mirror they did not know existed.
Poetry is not black ink on a white page.
Poetry is the place where one encounters another’s experience.
The reader—whether they choose to or not—will complete the poem I have only sketched. If there is any merit in this, it belongs not to the author but to the verses themselves. Pessoa knew this well: even a great poet leaves only a few true poems, surrounded by failures, drafts, and silence. Personal opinions matter very little. What is essential happens elsewhere.
We live in a strange world: every day people are more interested in poets and less interested in poetry. The poet has ceased to be the voice of the tribe and has become just another entertainer. Their biography, their excesses, their alliances and conflicts circulate easily; the poems do not. And yet, I still believe poetry is something else entirely: a form of love that exists only in silence, in a secret pact between two people—almost always strangers.
That is why the idea of anonymity has always drawn me in. Juan Ramón Jiménez once dreamed of a magazine without signatures, made of poems and not of poets. I share that desire: that poetry be anonymous because it is collective. That the conversation be about the text, not the name. That if a verse moves someone, it hardly matters who wrote it. In truth, poems belong to those who read them. You—their author—who invent them as you read.
Yesterday something happened that confirmed all of this.
A teacher—someone who has been essential in my path—shared one of my texts without asking for permission. He did so because he felt it needed to be shared. And the text traveled. It reached places I cannot control, people I do not know. There were responses. Many of them. Readers who recognized themselves, who said “I’ve been there,” who named that quiet discomfort that suffocates and demands the death of old versions of ourselves.
Someone told me, “it seems you unlocked a new level of writing.”
Perhaps that is the highest reward of all.
I confess I felt a strange sense of unease: the discomfort of being read by strangers. I still believe too much has been said about almost everything, and that perhaps we should read more and write less. But I also remember the task Emerson assigned to the genius of every age: to write our own books, to express our own ideas, to think in our own voice. And so I return to writing.
I no longer write to be labeled an author. Even the legitimate desire to make a living from writing, I imagine through anonymity. I do not seek fame; I seek sustenance. I seek to honor literature, not the literary figure. I seek structures capable of making the complex simpler, a syntax that helps express what we think with greater clarity and honesty. Above all, I seek not to be read, but to be a place where others read themselves.
Yesterday was a day of gratitude.
Gratitude to the intelligence—or the harmony—that made a text of that reach and feeling possible. Gratitude to those who shared it, to those who read it, to those who allowed words to fulfill their essential function: to help us think and feel better, if only for an instant. Gratitude as well to those who, through a quiet gesture, allowed the letters to expand and reach more open, lucid minds.
Yesterday I confirmed that it is possible to write and be read.
To be read and, in that act, help decipher what hurts so it may be repaired. To create, from that understanding, a slightly more inhabitable landscape.
I will not know many of my readers.
I may never cross their paths or hear their voices.
But in the silent moment when a text touches them,
in that second when someone recognizes themselves in a line
and understands something about who they are,
we are no longer strangers.
There, and only there, what truly matters occurs:
the word fulfills its destiny,
the poem ceases to be mine,
and literature—if only for a moment—comes alive again.
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