We present this work in honor of the 95th anniversary of the poet’s death.
Who could fall asleep, as a child falls asleep; smile between dreams to the dream of pain; and dream of friends and dream of affection; and slowly sink into a greater dream.
And walk through life sleepwalking, eyes wide open on an inner world, with sealed lips, eternally mute, attentive only to the rhythm of your own heart…
And go through life without leaving a trace… To be the poor stream that evaporates in the sun… and lose one night, as a star dies, that burned thousands of years, and that nobody saw it…
Under the sky born after the rain, I hear the quiet slap of oars against the water and I’m thinking: happiness is nothing but the quiet slap of oars against the water. Or maybe it’s nothing but the light on a small boat, appearing and disappearing on the dark swell of years slow as a funeral supper. Or the light of a house discovered behind the hill when we’d thought nothing remained but to walk and walk. Or the gulf of silence between my voice and the voice of someone revealing to me the true names of things simply by calling them up: poplars, roofs. The distance between the clinking of a bell on a sheep’s neck at dawn and the thud of a door closing after a party. The space between the cry of a wounded bird out on the marsh and the folded wings of a butterfly just over the crest of a wind-swept ridge. That was happiness: drawing random figures in the frost, fully aware they’d hardly last at all, breaking off a pine bough on the spur of the moment to write our names in the damp ground, catching a piece of thistledown to try and stop the flight of a whole season. That’s what happiness was like: brief as the dream of a felled sweet acacia tree or the dance of a crazy old woman in front of a broken mirror. Happy days pass as quickly as the journey of a star cut loose from the sky, but it doesn’t matter. We can always reconstruct them from memory, just as the boy sent out to the courtyard for punishment collects pebbles to form resplendent armies. We can always be in the day that’s neither yesterday nor tomorrow, gazing up at a sky born after the rain and listening from afar to a quiet slap of oars against the water.
We present this work in honor of the 50th anniversary of the poet’s death.
When I die I want your hands on my eyes: I want the light and the wheat of your beloved hands to pass their freshness over me one more time to feel the smoothness that changed my destiny.
I want you to live while I wait for you, asleep, I want for your ears to go on hearing the wind, for you to smell the sea that we loved together and for you to go on walking the sand where we walked.
I want for what I love to go on living and as for you I loved you and sang you above everything, for that, go on flowering, flowery one,
so that you reach all that my love orders for you, so that my shadow passes through your hair, so that they know by this the reason for my song.
We present this work in honor of the 50th anniversary of the poet’s death.
There are five thousand of us here. In this small part of the city. Five thousand. How many of us are there in all In the cities and in all the country? Here we are, ten thousand hands Who plant the seeds and keep the factories running. So much humanity, hungry, cold, panicked, in pain, Under moral duress, terrified out of their minds! Six of ours lost themselves In the space of the stars. One man dead, one man beaten worse than I ever thought It was possible to beat a human being. The other four wanted to free themselves of all their fear. One jumped into the void. Another beat his head against the wall. But all had the fixed look of death in their eyes. What fear is provoked by the face of fascism! They carry out their plans with the utmost precision, not giving a damn about anything. For them, blood is a medal. Killing is an act of heroism. My God, is this the world You created? Is this the product of Your seven days of wonders and labour? In these four walls, there is nothing but a number that does not move forward. That, gradually, will grow to want death. But my conscience suddenly awakens me And I see this tide without a pulse And I see the pulse of the machines And the soldiers, showing their matronly faces, full of tenderness. And Mexico, Cuba, and the world? Let them cry out of this ignominy! We are ten thousand fewer hands that do not produce. How many of us are there throughout our homeland? The blood of our comrade the President pulses with more strength than bombs and machine guns. And so, too, will our fist again beat. Song, how hard it is sing you when I have to sing in fear! Fear like that in which I live, and from which I am dying, fear. Of seeing myself amidst so much, and so many endless moments In which silence and outcry are the targets of this song. What have never seen before, what I have felt and what I feel now Will make the moment break out…
We present this work in honor of the 55th anniversary of the poet’s death.
To Winett
Oh, peoples! I am like the total fuck up of the world. The song face to face with Satan himself, dialogues with the tremendous science of the dead, and my pain spurts blood at the city.
Even my days are what remains of enormous antiques, Baby, last night “God” cried between worlds that go like this, alone, and you say: “I love you”, when you talk with “your” Pablo, without ever hearing me. The man and the woman reek of tomb; my body crumples onto the brute earth the same as the red coffin of the wretched.
A total enemy, I howl through the streets, A horror more barbarous, more barbarous, more barbarous than the baying of a hundred dogs left to die.
We present this work in honor of the 35th anniversary of the poet’s death.
In your opinion one love erases another and so it is, dear, yet in love not everything belongs to the dart and quiver— false starts—or is part of the wound that bewilders all pleasure, all grief twin of death, metaphor for birth The victims of Eros survive the crime that, joyfully, they’re passive agents of its authors in a mysterious moment and they don’t forget at least I don’t: my memory of you remains, independent of love as in that painting by Magritte where the dawn sky still hasn’t dissolved night in the street nor its precious moon: a light curdled in the streetlight that darkly illuminates that road It’s true, the oxymoron is no more than a figure of speech and can be guilty of premeditation Not so myself, at least I hope not, if I tell you: one love doesn’t erase another Memory, also, in its way loves and, as someone said, “There is no forgetting.”
A red glow. A furtive ray rocking the grove. Silky and shiny sateen is, unnerving the needles of the vast pine wood.
Sateen tainting carmine amid the grass and on the moss. Lit carmine burning in the hollow of the ivy. Carmine Carampangue of satiny blood smoothing the satin skin. The skin that strokes, snakes and seeks caressing the emerald with the tail of the dead, the sparkling of the green foliage lashed violently by the wind at the edge of the blue ell of the chasms, here at the beginning of the valley.
Sateen is made of blood and shiny and of treacherous velvet the fabric of the figures that now flame in the sun like knife light. Terrified under the splendor, in the blades cut by the beam, figuring holy cavities amid the murmuring nets of the forest. What silence. Of green firmament or inner bell. The woman pricks up her ears in amazement. Flame is the dress that covers her, fire the stunning skirt.
The humid rips in the lamé, pure spell of reflection, turning into blood the green virginity of the forest. The lamé splits in the green, creating blue flares in its mirror. In the simile, the bristling of a millenary, radiant tapestry:
Long drool of a silenus, Beelzebub, crawls, and the forked garrulous currents of an agitated mob of curling snakes Oh, the Leontine and Egyptian eyes of hieratic herons and owls.
Everything is velvet.
The sinuous mane of an ancient woman the black silk of a vibrant butterfly the sacred muscles of nocturnal panthers.
Iridescent volcanoes curl their spit in the distance in the distance like large, huge comet tails.