I spent the summer using the fantastic binomial technique developed by Gianni Rodari — the beloved Italian writer whose stories lit up my Bulgarian childhood — as a creative prompt for poetry, part of the larger binomial two people co-create when their worlds touch each other in a meaningful way. Each week I’d be given two unrelated words and tasked with twining them into a poem.

Summers end. Worlds tilt away from each other, drift apart, resume their orbit, transformed. This is how the final binomial — “dust” and “life” — wrote itself in me, read here by the living poem that is Nick Cave.

ODE TO A GOOD PEN
by Maria Popova

Over and over
we borrow the book of love
from the lending library of the possible
and ask of it
        everything,
only to find its pages
blank and beckoning,
impelling us
to keep writing the story
as it keeps changing,
keeps reading us
back to ourselves —
an endless translation
from some other tongue,
unfinished and unfinishable,
written in dust
between endpapers
marbled with life.

Then, “Forgiveness.”