Honey, I say, how do you say love?
Love, speak to me in your language
How do you say we, this, how do you say that?
What I mean is she and I, our relationship, our feelings for each other
And she tells me
Joyfully, she expresses herself
With the words and sounds of her mother-tongue
She speaks about our feelings, our love
My eyes are wide open, my ears not so
I focus on her lips, not on the sound they made
Honey, I say, how do you say love?
And she tells me
She pronounces God’s Word in her language
And I repeat that word
My tongue struggles to copy her accent
It’s not so, she says
And she repeats the word, slowly
And her mouth draws the word that springs from her lips like a soap bubble
Multicoloured, diaphanous, light, subtle, ethereal, precious, fragile, agile
Universal, because once on the air, the word – love - belongs to everybody
Whether we understand it or not, whether we accept it or not
And the word is born in her lips and raises, fly
Nest in my ears and filters in my heart
My lips trembling, I repeat the word, love
Pronounced by her differently, in another language
A foreign one, far, exotic, strange
She hears me and smiles; she corrects my pronunciation
Corrects my pitch, modulation, accent, the verb, the entire word
This is how you say it, she says
And on her lips, love transforms into a delicious fruit
A luscious cherry, a delectable strawberry covered by the morning dew
And I learned that love is a fruit wrapped by a skin of feelings that she peels
Kiss by kiss
Tender kisses, fresh, heavenly, delicate
And I say again that magnificent word
And she corrects me
You don’t have only to say it, she says.
Love is not an ordinary word.
It’s not enough to say it, for it doesn’t exist by itself
You’ve got to feel it; you’ve got to adore it
And I know she is right
Love is a word one must learn to pronounce in any language
There should always be an attentive ear to hear it
Passionate lips ready to repeat it
Love is a complete word, like life
You can say it with their lips, with the soul
Using the common language of the skin
Love is a profound word
Only absence measures its depth
You can whisper love snuggling together
Holding hands, looking into each other eyes
Laughing freely with an open laugh
Repeat it as many times as you wish
Like a caress, once and again
In any language
In any accent
In any tongue
Because love is more than a word
In any language
In any accent
In any tongue
Love is a power that generates and regenerates
By itself, it has its own life
In my language and yours
In a multitude of languages
For it is in the air, on the Earth, on the seas
True, love is what makes us all
Speakers of a universal language.
Citizens of a republic yet to be founded.
