Photo by ronstik / Adobe Stock

In the pages of a book, I wander,
Not through words, but through shadows cast by letters—
Each a shape, each a code I struggle to break.
What are these symbols? Are they my enemies?
Or simply the gods of a forgotten tongue,
Waiting for me to understand their quiet dance?

Ah, the page! It mocks me with its clarity,
A clarity I cannot grasp,
As if to say, This is simple, child—look, see!
But the letters slip away like water through fingers,
A world of meaning trapped behind invisible walls.
Is it the meaning that evades, or is it I?
Am I the outsider here,
Or the only one truly awake?

My mind—fractured, unraveled in the alphabet—
Searches for coherence in a sea of dissonant sounds,
A word here, a fragment there,
That flutters, half-formed, like a bird learning flight.
Yet still, I press on—what else remains?
The road is long, and the words tremble
Like the faintest of stars, just out of reach.

For in this dance of letters,
Where syllables twist and bend,
Perhaps there is a secret meaning—
A truth not written in the words,
But in the space between them,
A language only the broken mind can hear,
A rhythm known only to the heart that stumbles.

I move forward, unsteady,
But with the belief that I will arrive—
Not at some final understanding,
But at a deeper knowing,
That in the dyslexia of my mind,
There is a poetry too complex to be tamed.

Translation from the Portuguese