This is my entry for #monomad challenge by @monochromes
I love a small cemetery near my town, placed under Montecuccolo castle.
It is very small, inside an old wood.
I love it after snowfall.
Time ago, I woke up early in morning, walking in fresh snow, climbing the gate and entered inside it, to breathe the atmosphere and the silence of this place.
I didn't know any dead people here, but the same I tried to imaginate their past life. It is like an imaginary and personal Spoon River Anthology.
Snow was very high, covering most of graves.
Last night I had a dream: my boss ordered me to draw on a A4 paper with a black pencil, but only the 70% of the sheet. The remaining part appeared empty. I don't know the meaning, maybe I have lived the 70% of my life, and it remained to only a 30%, white and untouched as snow, to live. So this evening my brain has remembered this old shooting at the cemetery, and my relationship with death.
In the dream I turned on some candles on the the top of a snowy mountain, to remember friends lost under an avalanches. Now they are light driving our earthly acts. They want us to be alive and full of live, they live inside and through us. Death gives more value to life.
Silence. Nothing, nobody around. Only a bright and immense white. Snow muffled every noise. A break in my life to be there. Presence is stronger in absence.
I loved the contrast between dark graves and clear snow.
In my head the words by James Joyce: "His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead".
How much stress in our ordinary life. Meeting, contrast, different point of views... Here nothing more than a distant bird, or a thought falling into conscience like fresh snow falling by trees, at first sunbeams.
How has been life of these people? How complex, difficult, plenty of joy and pain, where are all these memories? Is there any traces of them?
I have no answers, only questions and oblivion.
I stayed, alive but with my heart listening for every gasp, looking for a sign.
A couple. Again together.
('Coniugi' means 'spouses').
I touched eternity.
I could not read the names, they were covered, but it didn't matter, because of this picture is universal.
Is love eternal? Where friendship go after dead? Is there a special place where we can meet again them? Does soul still exist afterlife?
Too much questions.
Good to have question, more question than answers, but sometimes our questions are too much, or simply useless. I wished just stay here, connected to the universe, nothing more, wrapped in mystery.
Mariangela Gualtieri has written this poem for your dying mother, wishing them a sweet end:
"You descend with unbeatable grace
you go down fixing your hair
and fall as you wish to pick flowers.
Mother, become immense. Everything becomes.
Sing in the wind. Laugh with every leaf
and make that flower light.
And lay like the night
quiet, immense, eternal.
All earthly maternal light".
I want to find sweetness and beauty also in death. It is not the real end.
Forgive, realize your dreams, work less.
If the world hurts you, take the world distant from you.
We live in this world, but we don't really belong to it.
Dear death, take me gently when my hour will came.
Snow was cold, like the death, but farmers teach that under the snow there is the bread.
And again, forever, other life. Death is natural as life, death brings life, if only we weren't so afraid of it, we could live more in harmony with each other.
Forgive, forget, love.
Pictures taken many years ago, maybe centuries ago, they have no time.
With my old Nikon FE2 camera, Ilford HP5 films.