Young Latina woman with light brown curly hair, earrings, and a blue and yellow and white patterned top. Digital image overlaid with stars.

Beyond the Stars 

The stars are but holes in the sky’s cloak, 

where whispers of nameless worlds seep through. 

I search for your shadow in every crevice, 

like a river seeking the sea in the desert. 

Your voice is an echo trapped in the crystal of years, 

shattering into a thousand flashes with every breath. 

I gather it with hands of dampness and salt, 

like one who collects fragments of the moon on the edge of night. 

Time is a tapestry of invisible threads, 

stitching our lives to bodies of stone. 

But we are the thread that escapes the loom,

twisting around the heart of the universe. 

Beyond the stars, there is no darkness: 

there is a sea of ​​light where 

weightless memories swim. 

There, your smile is an island of cold fire, 

and I am the wind that caresses it 

without touching it. 

Our love is a silence that takes shape, 

like the space between the notes of a song never sung. 

It lives in the place where dreams end 

and things that don’t need to be said begin… 

GRACIELA NOEMI VILLAVERDE is a writer and poet from Concepción del Uruguay (Entre Rios) Argentina, based in Buenos Aires She graduated in letters and is the author of seven books of poetry, awarded several times worldwide. She works as the World Manager of Educational and Social Projects of the Hispanic World Union of Writers and is the UHE World Honorary President of the same institution’s Activa de la Sade, Argentine Society of Writers. She is the Commissioner of Honor in the executive cabinet in the Educational and Social Relations Division of the UNACCC South America – Argentina Chapter.