| Poesia
 Old Lady Sleeps, Courteau, 2009 The old Lady sleeps No one remembers her And what she once knew Now only the dead keep
The drowned are thirsty For metal rumours Abyssal prayers And the creaking of keel
Anything’s small talk When you have centuries When futures and expectancies Weigh nothing anymore
And at night they sing In a rotting shells choir That age lost its flower In vain do you shed tears
When in ‘em you swim forever 
A Strange Nothingness, Murdoch, 1966 “The sun is out and the water is smooth. The descending line stretches two hundred feet below us. Today, we will attempt to touch the end of it. I’m the third man on a team of four. As we start down, we must swim hard against the buoyancy of our suits. Conditions are bad. Plankton is dense and visibility is vague at best. Seventy feet: I have to stop. The other divers wait. Finally, my ears clear and we continue. We have become heavier now as we slide feet first through this upward rain of bubbles. Ninety feet: all is gloom. Our lights flash on. Strange… as I study the diver opposite me, I am beginning to receive his thought impulses. There is a dimension of communication in water that transcends sight or sound. For fleeting moments my mind seems one with his. I am aware of the exhilaration of spirit he is feeling as he descends this lifeline into the unknown. Without trying to, he transmits his excited thoughts. I feel his accelerated awareness. Now I find his judgment fogging as we slip deeper. And so is mine. I must be careful. And so must he. One hundred feet: my pupils must be fully dilated. What I see is a strange nothingness rushing up—ever fainter and gloomier. We’re in total blackness. Now tiny luminous sparks begin to fly past my face. It is eleven-thirty a.m. Night. As total as night can be. Yet I wonder, is night any more absolute beneath me, or quiet more soundless?” from the unpublished The Quiet Place, by Frank Murdoch
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