Her Name is Sabine*

From: “News from Paradise”

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refrigerator buzzing through noise

of all busy holiday time

sweets served simultaneously

with the conversations intertwined slowly

with another version of life

on the other side of the line

echoes of the past appearing in the present

when there is no time for it now

disruption on the way

it can’t help us

coming back like a boomerang

to the place where we started

even if it feels like a million miles away

when I leap back in time

through all the things I can find

that shaped me today

slowly fading away

in the darkness of the trained state

never frank, always fretful

never calm, only combating

this little enemy inside of me

revealing its unpopular views on things

causing me to distance myself

from the other side of the world

not exactly on my way

still dealing with it with dignity

as if it were all mine

shame that it was someone else’s dream

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*I named my poem after the 2007 documentary by French actress, film director, and screenwriter Sandrine Bonnaire, in which she portrays her autistic sister Sabine. Sandrine was one of the muses of Agnès Varda (30 May 1928 – 29 March 2019), one of the most influential directors of the French New Wave film movement of the 1950s and 1960s. I have a chance to encounter Agnès’ work for the first time during one of the New Horizons Film Festivals in Poland and since then her movies and documentaries have stuck to me. The image I used to illustrate my poem is very autobiographical because as a teenager I had a similar pink swimsuit and although I hated it, now that I look back, it somehow fits in with the also disabled Sabine who wears the same costume in this movie as well.

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originally published at https://medium.com

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