This morning, with the Colorado Rocky Mountains still keeping their caps warm under snow, I searched for contemporary Italian poets.
My discovery was works by Elisa Biagini, a poet from Florence, who writes about invisible wounds and their relationship with existing identity or how we modify them.
One poem, called L’ospite (The Guest) has imagery that I had not encountered before. And in one sentence Biagini touches upon so many aspects of being wounded, hiding your wounds, consequently projecting different identities (“you’s”.)
Those lines are:
"Quante tu sono in te, come chiodi sotto strati di colore, cicatrici notate solo al tatto, chiavi rimaste in fondo ad un cassetto?"
("How many you’s are in you, like nails under layers of paint, scars
evident only to the touch, keys left at the bottom of a drawer?")
Beautiful!
… And I recalled my embryology teacher from 45 years ago. He was an eccentric who always managed to associate science with literature and philosophy. His style helped some of us to not only understand science but remember that knowledge when navigating through the arts in search of meaning and paths of communication.
The line from Biagini brought back the memory of one embryology class when we were learning about how facial features were being formed around the 8th week of pregnancy.
“Today we will talk of migration” the professor started.
“Migration is not only for animals and humans – cell populations also migrate during embryonic development and come together, meet and fuse creatively.”
“Who knows how the Philtrum is created?”
Most of us did not know what a Philtrum was.
“It is the groove between your nose and upper lip. It is what makes a woman express things without words, and a man struggle every morning to shave clean under the nose.”
“A Philtrum is created by the migration and fusion of cells from three prominences: from the frontonasal and two paired maxillaries. That north-south and east-west migration of cells fuse and the Philtrum is formed.
Sometimes the fusion is imperfect and you get facial deformities. It is like a wound that heals. Maybe like a scar.”
It was the word cicatrici (scars) in Biagini’s poem that somehow found this almost half-century memory stored in a corner of my brain.
“Like nails under layers of paint”…
She did not write “layer”. She knew that our scars are hidden by experience, time, and mostly by ourselves under many layers of protection.
Many layers of self-protection. Of identity.
June 28, 2026
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2026
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