"Finally" is the first word of Luca Flauto's poem, and it suggests a long wait before the walk it announces. The title, «XI - 2nd June», reads like a diary heading. The Roman numeral hints that the poem may belong to a larger sequence, though the text alone can't confirm that. What the poem gives us is one day and the night before it: a walk through a forest, a memory of touching someone's wrists, and a sleepless dawn in a kitchen. Its central idea is that the shelter the speaker has been searching for is not a place but a person, and that the real task afterwards is to keep such a moment from disappearing.
The poem builds this idea by letting the landscape and the body blur together. The river "drawing a line" becomes "a pulsing vein," and the stanza ends without punctuation. The next one begins, "The same I felt the night before / touching your wrists." The pulse of the river and the pulse under the skin are joined across the stanza break, so the reader feels the two images connect. The same thing happens when the lover's palms remind the speaker of "the body of a leaf, laid naked on the grass." Nature is not just a pretty backdrop here. It is the vocabulary the speaker uses to understand touch.
The verbs are worth watching too. The speaker is "kidnapped" by the forest, a harsh word that turns gentle once we see that it means surrender. Later, "Passion tasted us," so passion is the one acting while the lovers receive. The speaker is carried along by the forest, then by desire. Only the tender details are chosen: lips that "slipped down on my neck / down to the back," where the repeated "down" makes the line slide. Then comes a quiet confession: "Your warmth relieved / my invisible scars." Judging by this line, the speaker has been hurt before, though the poem never says how. The scars are invisible, and so is whatever caused them.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no regular meter. The short lines, often only three to five words, move at walking pace, and the stanzas vary in length like uneven paths. The simple, plain vocabulary keeps the emotion direct. Some phrasing, like "reminded me the body of a leaf," is slightly unconventional, and that gives the voice a sincere, unpolished quality.
The emotional turn comes in the "nymph" stanza. The speaker imagines floating among the trees "in search of a shelter," as if the forest spirit were homeless. Then a tiny two-part stanza corrects the fantasy: "I was just dreaming / because the shelter was / right next to me." The sentence is broken across line breaks, as if the speaker is slowly realising it. The search was unnecessary, because what they were looking for was already there.
After the open forest, the final stanzas move indoors to a small, ordinary scene: the speaker on the kitchen counter, watching the sunrise through the window, "A glass of water between my hands." This line has no verb and simply holds still. The hands that explored a lover's palms now hold something plain and cool, which suggests the night has left the speaker calm but a little dazed. The "misty night" was "too short / to get some sleep," which tells us the speaker preferred staying awake to losing it.
The closing lines explain why. "I had this beautiful time / and I held it as a treasure / too beautiful to vanish, / too precious to waste it." The poem opened in the present tense ("we can walk") and has slid into the past, so we realise the speaker is already remembering. Writing the poem is the way of holding the treasure. The two parallel phrases, "too beautiful" and "too precious," work like a vow.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. It treats a private, modest moment as something that deserves care. It does not shout about love. It shows it through a river, a leaf, a glass of water and a sunrise, and it admits how fragile such a moment is, which is why the speaker tries so hard to keep it.