It is a mid winter morning of luminiscent beauty
Bianca and I walk down to school
And she goes ‘one day I will be an astronaut’
In the precise spot where last week she told me
She wanted to be a mathematician,
Two weeks ago a poet
Three weeks ago a mother of five kids
Four weeks ago a surgeon.
It is the location of the walk to school
Where our little chats get
Into a dreamy status
When the mundane arguments
Are exhausted
When the review of her homework
Triggers a sparkle
As intuition of good.
The more I dig into our morning walks
Through the tree-lined street
her blue and green uniform and her etruscan smile
At ease with the fast steps of these times
The more I learn about hope and dreams.
About hope for the future
And the dreams of a completely new generation.
Bianca walks and grows
Through seasons changing like her life
We have seen snow, flowers, leaves
Under our feet.
Hand in hand.
We run, we walk, we laugh
I tell her off for something
Or, more often, she kindly reprimends me
For my momentary absence of attention
Like if every word she says
Should be considered a statement
It is a political world
She tells me
People want to be listened to
Kids are people
And we never listen to them
We never give attention enough
To our children and that child inside
That child that keeps asking, asking
Asking, asking, wanting, desiring, asking again
Asking for freedom
For peace
For a soul nurtured by love
And kindness
Happiness and more smiles
For things to learn
And turn into wisdom
The little wisdom of seeing thing through
It is a political world,
We are all politicians, she said
Because we all want something good
And we want it for others too
We want the kids in the street
And the ones far away
Blessed by the same sense of love, protection
And freedom to dream all over it again
What to become one day.
We get to school
The class room is sealed
And the parents flock away
But the sense of dream hangs over my head.
Yes, I say to an imaginary Bianca next to me,
As she waves from the school window smiling
It is a political world
And, if politics are what you say,
Keeping asking for
It is a rather beautiful one