Poetry By Dorotea Ceperic

Camille Bouliere CC




Sea without Witness

One day
you’ll walk under those trees,
same sky,
and it will hurt differently.
All the shaking,
all the wrong rooms,
all the unnamed hunger,
not emptiness.
Just a language
no one taught you to speak.
Cypress in the air.
Sharp. Clean.
The past
forgetting your name.
You’ll step out
of people,
of standards,
of the need to be held together
for someone else.
Violets will open in spring
without asking.
You’ll understand
how much of your life
was permission.
Lilac light on your skin.
Old versions of you
slipping off quietly.
You won’t become whole.
You’ll become vast.
Sea.
Endless blue.
Depth that doesn’t explain itself.
You’ll breathe 
because you can.
Love 
without being saved.
Exist 
without being seen.
Let it enter you.
The cold.
The clarity.
You were never broken.
Only scattered.
And when you gather yourself
it won’t be to be fixed 
but to move
like something
that finally belongs
to itself.

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Dorotea Ceperic is a Croatian poet living on the island of Krk. She began writing in her teens, receiving local awards before stepping away from poetry after becoming a mother. She returned to it years later, where the proximity of the sea mirrors her inner landscape. Her work is instinctive and shaped by trauma, transformation, and the quiet space between emotional numbness and survival.

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