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The faraway is not your destiny. Everything is near. Flower, grass, tree./Lamentation exists only/in the lost sheep. /You have no dowry/for your marriage with death.

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By Marco Jerez

—Culturadoor exclusive—

Día de publicación: 17-Agosto-2010

The Voyage

Unfurling the rose’s sail
forward into the sea of wind;
I am the sailor of secret routes
voyages incomprehensible, mysterious.
It is the hour of twilight
abundant in fishes.
Because Venus
—it is known—
is morning’s song
and evening’s.
The voice calls forth
the ambiguous
clarity of shadow.
The numberless stars
no longer a prophesy
of categorical endings.
Everything is a beginning.
The rudder of the rose,
the prow of my ship,
the shadow’s clarity,
the numberless stars.
There are no absolute endings.

The Call in my Garden

Who called at my garden’s gate?
Abruptly I thought it
Death, its pallid voice
calling from a distance;
halting clocks,
seconds rushed
to life’s brink.
This is the hour of nestless birds.
Exiled from life and the world,
banished from chronologies,
I traveled on through my garden.
Loneliness intoned a song
without staves, without tears.
Life was not calling.
Listening intently, while
the vegetation of silence
sowed its seeds
in my soul, I heard the Voice
far beyond death and life
far beyond my humble garden.
The Voice came from a lost paradise
falling like crystalline water
a remembrance of childhood.
All was unbound clamor,
clay shrieking at the touch of the Potter
when it should sing.
My dust a blasphemy,
an arrogance of mud,
the world snakelike
forked tongue of sin.
The Voice of God is a tongue of fire,
fire without end.
It burns and burns inside the bush.
Into the bottomless region
of its unction and its keening
the soul knows memory’s
ancestral summons.
How vain I was in my clay!
How vain in my mud!
How vain was I in my garden!
I wanted to leave my fields
and God told me, “No,
here the seed is good,
the land is ready for
plowing, and there is
still a place
for the R ose.”

Song of the Beginning

Everything waits with the faith
of a peasant,
the baptismal water
that again will name me.
Surrounded by what has shaped me,
the forgotten things;
everyday things of life
and death
call out for their new names.
Primordial and Adamic,
I arrive to the final gift
my garden
with words of water.
I will also be last,
the slow expectation,
naked silence
cloaked in shadow.
History gave me no name
nor surname,
anonymous I am
with the faith of an unknown peasant.
I want pardon
not to be the Adam
of a new Fall
another exile on my shoulders,
the grief of Cain
birthed infinitely.
Isn’t it enough
the mark of the first assasin?
Thus will I be
the not named,
the peasant returning
humbly to his land
harvesting the fruit
with ancient incantations.

Childhood

By the accretion of infancy, the child
comes to be a creator,
profound in memory,
legendary in youth,
deeply innocent.
The guitar doesn’t cry
what the lyre laughs,
and every rhythm waits
for the rites of drums.
The infancy that grows
in the poem
is childhood matured
in all things.

The Inheritance

The faraway is not your destiny.
Everything is near.
Flower, grass, tree.
Lamentation exists only
in the lost sheep.
You have no dowry
for your marriage with death.
For this reason, you will live.
You were a poor shepherd to your flock.
You will return to your valley:
Abel’s sheep still have no master.
It is your dominion,
claim your inheritance,
take up your tents;
give thanks to God
with the first fruits,
kneeling before His Glory.

Way be yond Words

Imitation of a smile,
the moon is in its quarter,
the nightchamber.
The sky smiles on
earth’s gardens.
Loneliness
lies in the ashes
reeling off words.
Overflowing with surprises
traveling through dictionaries
way beyond the terms
moon,
earth,
I,
ruin.
Way beyond words.

Time

The withered limbs of tables
testify
there was a before
and an after;
an evidence of time
as a postulate
of things.
Childhood returns,
redemptive,
in search of the forgotten;
concrete supposition
of the abstract.
The forms of life
arise from
a now
full of nostalgia
waiting for a then
revelatory of the origin.