We present this work in honor of the poet’s 70th birthday.
We are hatchets of steel and fire.
We live to reap and illuminate.
With the metal,
we fell the trunk.
With the flame,
we illuminate the cut,
the felling of what we are.
We present this work in honor of the poet’s 135th birthday.
I was born in a white sleeping city
under the pious wing of its eaves,
where in large flowerbeds they look stretched out
its carpet of whiteness the lemon trees.
Staining the horizon they spin restlessly
dominating the landscape from above,
the tireless blades of the weather vanes
defying the clouds in their madness.
City of my grandparents, with your upright
Centennial laurels! Your burning
flamboyants, your lilies of pure white dawn…
Every time I think of you sweetly and distantly,
I compare you in my dreams to a sultana
who, lying on the bed, stretches!
We present this work in honor of the poet’s 120th birthday.
Sudden, first
grey
hair, like an icy hello
from the one I love most…
you gave me the slip, and among
this riot of hair I haven’t found you again;
now I look for you,
as one indifferently seeks
a forgotten face.
I needn’t hide you;
the whole world could pass by,
it would be absurd for anyone
to suspect your presence.
Only I will know about this buried treasure.
I’ll scribble some humorous lines,
and you’ll forget me while I greet
people; if the barber uncovers you,
he will scientifically
expound on your presence,
then prescribe a hair tonic.
He’ll be the only one to know about you
but I’ll hush him in disbelief,
ask him to be discrete,
and you’ll remain one fleeting
thought amid a myriad.
In twenty years, you will long
have gone off into the world;
by then it will be normal
for no one to spot you
among others of the same age.
We present this work in honor of the poet’s 85th birthday.
If you want to study its essence, its purpose,
its usefulness in the world,
you’ve got to see it as a whole. Salt
isn’t the individuals who make it up
but the solidary tribe. Without it
each particle would be like a fragment of nothingness,
dissolving in some unthinkable black hole.
Salt surfaces from the sea. It’s petrified
foam.
It’s sea baked by the sun.
And so finally worn-out,
deprived of its great water force,
it dies on the beach to become stone in the sand.
Salt is the desert where there once was sea.
Water and land
reconciled,
matter of no one.
It’s why the world tastes of what it is to be alive.
Translation by Katherine M. Hedeen and Víctor Rodríguez Núñez
We present this work in honor of the poet’s 110th birthday.
Blessèd be
The humble
Poets
Because
From them
Will rise
The kingdoms
Of the
Grass
We present this work in honor of the 145th anniversary of the poet’s death.
I am finally in the den of death
where sorrows and pains do not fly,
where the stars and flowers do not shine,
where there is no memory that awakens.
If one day nature has fun
breaking the horrors from this prison,
and its burning, wandering breaths
pour on my loose dust,
I, for eternity already devoured,
Will I enjoy if that dust is a rose?
Will I moan if a serpent nests in it?
Not even nightmares will give me a care,
Nor will a hateful voice frighten my sleep,
Not even a whole God will bring me back to life.
In honor of El Cinco de Mayo, we present this work by a master Mexican poet and statesman.
I have a sovereign at home,
the only one whom my soul venerates;
His gray hair is his crown,
honor is his law and virtue is his guide.
In slow hours of misery and mourning,
full of firm and manly constancy,
keep the faith with which he spoke to me about heaven
in the first hours of my childhood.
The bitter ban and sadness
They opened an incurable wound in his soul;
He is an old man, and he carries in his head
the dust of the path of life.
See the fierce storms of the world,
of luck the unfortunate hours,
and passes, like Christ the Tiberias,
standing on the curled waves.
Dry their tears, silence their pains,
and only on duty his eyes fixed,
collects thorns and spreads flowers
on the path he laid out for his children.
He told me: “To him who is good, bitterness
He never wets his cheeks with tears:
in the world the flower of fortune
At the slightest breath it falls off.
“Do good without fear of sacrifice,
The man must fight serene and strong,
and find who hates evil and vice
a bed of roses in death.
“If you are poor, be content and be good;
If you are rich, protect the unfortunate,
and the same in your home as in someone else’s
Save your honor to live honestly.
“Love freedom, free is man
and its most severe judge is conscience;
as much as your honor guards your name,
for my name and my honor form your inheritance.”
This august code, in my soul could
Since I heard it, it has been recorded;
In all the storms he was my shield,
He has saved me from all the storms.
My father has in his serene gaze
faithful reflection of your honest conscience;
so much loving and good advice
I surprise you in the brilliance of your gaze!
The nobility of the soul is its nobility;
the glory of duty forms his glory;
He is poor, but he contains his poverty
the biggest page in its history.
Being the worship of my soul your affection,
As luck would have it, by honoring his name,
was the love that inspired me as a child
the most sacred inspiration of man.
May heaven grant that the song that inspires me
His eyes always see him with love,
and of all the verses of my lyre
These are the ones worthy of his name.
We present this work in honor of the poet’s 110th birthday.
Water hollows stone,
wind scatters water,
stone stops the wind.
Water, wind, stone.
Wind carves stone,
stone’s a cup of water,
water escapes and is wind.
Stone, wind, water.
Wind sings in its whirling,
water murmurs going by,
unmoving stone keeps still.
Wind, water, stone.
Each is another and no other:
crossing and vanishing
through their empty names:
water, stone, wind.
We present this work in honor of the Mexican holiday, Constitution Day.
Plunged into the silence of the grave,
Were found the Mexican people:
Fatal silence interrupted only
By the chains they dragged.
The last groan of the unhappy slave
Was punished as if it had been an atrocious crime,
Or it resounded in the ears of the
Oppressors as if it were triumphal music.
Hidalgo cried at last with voice divine:
“Freedom to Mexico, and forever!”
And hurled war at the Spanish tyrant.
Eleven years the mortal conflict lasted;
The throne crumbled, and in its ruins
Floats the standard of liberty.
We present this work in honor of the 150th anniversary of the poet’s death.
Without tears, without complaints,
without farewells, without a sob!
We carried on until the last… fortune
brought us here with the same objective,
we both came to bury the soul
beneath the tomb of scepticism.
Without tears…tears have no power
to bring a cadaver back to life;
our flowers fall and they turn
but at least in the turning, they leave
us with dry sight and a firm conscience.
Now you see it! for your soul and mine
spaces and the world are deserts…
we have concluded both,
covered with sadness and affliction,
we’re not at the end, we’re just two corpses
in search of the shroud of forgetting.
Children and dreamers when we
barely left the cradle,
pain, still alien to our lives
slipping along sweet and serene
like a swan’s wing in a lagoon;
when the dawn of the first caress
hasn’t yet peeked beneath the veil
that the virginal ignorance of the child
extends between his eyelids and the sky
your soul like mine,
in its clock advancing the hour
and in their darknesses lighting the day,
they saw a panorama that opened
beneath a kiss and at that dawn’s light;
and feeling, upon seeing that countryside
the wings of a supreme force,
we opened them early, and early
they brought us to the end of the voyage.
We gave to earth
the tints of love, and of the rose;
to our garden nests and songs
to our heaven birds and stars;
we used up the flowers on the road
to fashion from them
a crown for the angel of destiny…
and today in the midst of sad discord
of such an agonized or dead flower
one lifts only the pale and deserted
bloom that is poisoned by memory.
From the book of life
what we write today is the last page…
Let’s close it at once
and in the sepulchre of lost faith
we will also bury our anguish.
And since heaven now concedes that
these evils are our last
so the soul can prepare to rest,
although the final tear cost us
we saw the task through to the end.
And afterward, when the angel of forgetting
has delivered these ashes
that guard the painful memory
of so many illusions smashed to bits
and of so much vanished pleasure,
we’ll leave these spaces and return
to the tranquil life of earth,
now that the night of early pain
advances toward and encloses us
in the sweet horizons of tomorrow.
Let’s leave these spaces or if you
want to, we can try out our breath,
a new journey to that blessed region
whose only memory resuscitates
the cadaver of the soul, upon feeling.
Let’s throw ourselves off this world then,
where everything is shadow and void,
we’ll make a moon from memory
if the sun of our love has grown cold;
we’ll fly if you like,
to the depths of those magic regions
and pretending hopes and illusions
we’ll smash the tomb and rising
on our bold and powerful flight,
we will form a heaven between shadows
and we will be the owners of that heaven.
Poets Corner 