A harbour at night, a few lampposts, a train far away: Luca Flauto's "V – Harbour at night" starts as a quiet scene and gradually shows itself to be about the anxiety of parting. The numeral in the title suggests the piece belongs to a longer sequence, but it reads perfectly well alone. Its central idea is that the fear of separation can be turned into something close to peace. Darkness first divides the speaker from "you", and by the end it gathers everyone into a shared dream.
The opening stanza builds distance out of ordinary things. "Lights out / just a few lampposts" is blunt and almost telegraphic. Then comes the smoke from chimneys, normally a sign of warm houses, which becomes "fog for your eyes, / keeping you away from me." A cosy detail turns into a barrier, and the speaker never says outright that the two are drifting apart. The second stanza keeps the same unease. The bridge is "far from the harbour," and the train is "floating / in the darkness." We probably see only its lit windows, with no tracks beneath them, so it seems to hang in the air. Bridge, train and harbour are all places of crossing and departure, so even the scenery seems to be getting ready for someone to leave.
The third stanza is the emotional turning point, and its grammar is the most interesting in the poem. "The feeling of losing / the fear of leaving" can be read in two ways. Because of the line break, we first hear "the feeling of losing," which is grief. Then the next line completes the phrase as "losing the fear of leaving," which means being freed from fear. The sentence slips from one meaning to the other as we read it. The only direct request in the poem follows: "Hug me tight, / make your breath / whisper away." The odd phrasing here seems deliberate. The breath is asked to whisper something away, and the fear seems to be what is meant to dissolve, carried off in a sound too soft to be words.
The last stanza widens the view from the couple to "the souls," a plural with no "I" or "you" left in it. The pronouns have been absorbed into a group "holding hands to each other." The title's "Harbour at night" also becomes "The harbour at night," and the definite article turns one scene into a kind of place, "the place where" something always happens. The imagery reaches upward in steps, from lampposts to the moon to the Milky Way. The moon is seen only "in the mirror of water," so it is reflected rather than looked at directly. In the first stanza sight was blocked by fog, but here indirect sight turns out to be enough, and even beautiful.
The word "leaving" returns in this final stanza with its meaning reversed. At first it was the thing to be afraid of, but now the souls are "leaving the nightmare / to dream about / the Milky Way." Departure is no longer a loss and has become an escape, from nightmare into dream. The repeated word is the poem's hinge, and it lets the speaker's wish come true in the language itself.
Formally, the poem is free verse, with no regular meter and no end-rhyme scheme. Its stanzas grow from five lines to four, four and then seven, and the last one is a single long sentence that unspools over its lines. Short, clipped lines such as "Lights out" give way to a chain of participles ("holding," "leaving," "dream") that feels like drifting. Sound does some of the work that rhyme usually does. The long "i" of "lights," "night" and "tight" recurs through the poem, and the soft "l" of "lampposts," "losing" and "leaving" gives the language a lulled, whispering quality.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with plain vocabulary. There are no elaborate metaphors, only fog, water, a train and the moon, and yet the poem moves from private fear to something shared and almost cosmic. It does not pretend that parting is painless. It suggests that closeness, a held hand or a breath, can change what darkness means.