COBWEBS
by Sorana Lucia Salomeia

Darkness tosses everywhere, all over the place and up there, in the sky, the chilly winds flutter grey tissues of heavy weeping clouds.
The earth is dizzy from the endless darkness.
It is cold, windy and so weary…
The smell of moist earth is in the air. The whole place is deserted.
There is not a soul in sight.
The gloomy mist slowly falls, hiding the far horizon.
A white veil is flowing in the air, carried on the light wings of the midnight wind.
In the sky, just on the top of the knoll that bathes its lap in the water of a silent river, appears a white cold star like an eye from another world and dimension.

With the departure of the sun, the calm mood of the day changes.
The restless dead leaves of autumn are stirred to irritated resurrection and whirled about unwillingly.
Weariness stifles the whole nature and the dull sky begins to tell its meaning by sending down herald drops of rain and the stagnant air changes into a fitful breeze which plays about unseen faces.
The silvery glaze on the river has vanished and from broad mirrors of light it has changed to a lustreless sheet of lead, with a raspy surface.
From the silent ground a strange smoke rises like a mystery unfolding its secrets after a long period of useless expectation.
As if following an ancient voice, thousands of souls and shadows walk in the night heading for an old castle, crossing the stream of moonlight. They are now approaching through the mournful grey of the sky and horizon.
Gaunt spectral creatures with tragic eyes-eyes that have witnessed tragic scenes of cataclysmic horror in inaccessible polar regions of a magnitude such as no human being has ever conceived, in such low temperatures that no man could endure; places which have beheld crashes of icebergs and their mute slide by the soothing light of the Aurora;
these are souls that once were half blinded by the whirl of colossal storms and terrible distortions and retained the expression of those features that such scenes have engendered.
This is the time when fright embraces all living creatures, ever wilder and tighter, freezing their blood.
And, while fright keeps on torturing, all minds try to chase it away with the inexorability of death and disgust for this life which they themselves had once disconsidered, with a safe conscience, strongly believing in the after life, where the saved spirit would unite with God...
But all the minds’ fancies collapsed, one by one, like a playing-card castle, only fright standing defiantly and rulingly, whispering in all souls a single word, a word in front of which everything breaks into pieces: death...
Drops of bitter grief pour endlessly into so many hearts, spreading a slow fear, like a disgusting octopus.
A trail of white rays of light sparkles on a cross watered by the tempest.
The flame within the mournful souls unites with the shining rays, with the noise of the storm, with the green of the plains, with the azure blue which seems to be an eye of infinity and with infinity itself into a hot harmony.

Now they all dream they would wake up dressed up in white and rosy flowers which would embalm the whole earth, waiting for spring to come with its white waves of light and joy.
And from dark forests from far away, life rises in unseen waves, the great, almighty, merciless and yet endlessly alluring life.
The love for life is floating in the air with trembles of silvery wings, singing glory hymns that pour happiness and thousands of hopes into all hearts that abandon themselves to the air as a swimmer to the wave.
But now everything is as unnatural and ghastly as a laugh in hell.
The streak of light dies in the flood of darkness as serenity and candour, that once were penetrating thousands of hearts and souls, mere deserted places, fade and disappear like chimeras.
In the distance there could be heard the murmurs of a river almost changing into strange whispers in the bitter darkness.
And now, at this crucial hour, one question rises from the depths of the unknown: who knows whether real life is beyond death, since every grave is a shelter for love, now more than ever, now, when everything floats between life and death, between the sky and the earth.

The window to the other world appears like a wooden cross framed by a white square.
The world sinks for a few moments into a deep silence, over which a soul floats softly and swings like a leaf on the mirror of a waveless water.
Through the steamed glass of the window many heads writhe and shivering eyes sparkle, like a vision from a bloody ballad.
The tops of the old fir-trees rise like dark, imploring hands to the purple sky filled with stars.
Millions of roses filled with snow start falling from above and all stars are now gathered into a drop of dew under the clear night sky.
A universe into a passing drop...
Cobwebs reveal their presence on sheds and walls where none had ever been observed till they were brought out into visibility by the crystallizing atmosphere,
hanging like loops of white worsted from hidden corners, posts and enchained gates.

Copyrighted © Sorana Salomeia, Iasi, Romania