Memory of a fire

LA VITA FELICE

[Postface to "Dentro" by Laura Anfuso]

Sometimes, a fire breaks out in the forest. It catches the leaves, the younger trees, and even the tall, sturdy ones. What happens around it? And what remains after the fire has passed? Laura Anfuso’s poems do not merge with this crackle — they remain suspended between what burns and what endures. It is in this in-between space, where smoke mingles with clouds, that a possibility for care takes root. Not healing, but a necessary time for the roots to keep growing in the soil.

In the silence that follows, Anfuso’s lines neither explain nor resolve. They move across a white surface, where each word gestures without overflowing.

Poetry becomes an act of listening — to what is spoken and, even before that, to what remains aside.

1.

White was among the first colors made by humans. In Paleolithic caves, kaolin and gypsum gave the painted animals an almost transcendent glow. In the Middle Ages, white gleamed in illuminated manuscripts, enriching the parchment with a residue of light. With the advent of print, however, white changed its meaning. As paper became the new medium for text and image, white turned into a neutral background — no longer pigment, but empty space. It was a deep shift, one that continues to shape our imagination through language: a blank page, a voiceless tone, a sleepless night.

Anfuso neither rejects these associations nor fully embraces them. Instead, she gives white a more layered meaning. It becomes something that sews, soothes, and heals — tied to silence in a more inward gaze: “calma la pelle/ occhi respira/ bianco il profumo/ che vita nasce” or “silenzio chiama/ di senso corpo suona/ compie la vita.” In her poetry, silence is not a retreat from words, but a way of granting them time and shape — like snow that covers without erasing, allowing pain or the landscape to resurface under renewed light.

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