Arte y Conciencia Revolucionaria: February 2009

Thursday, February 12, 2009

Ben Okri - Poeta Nigeriano

'Lines in Potensis'

- I see your face (from African Elegy)

I see your face
Where beauty is threatened
With violence
Roseate in the evening's
Chimerical murders.

Your face is angled at me
Like cubist lines catching
Innocence at calvary:
You trap misery
With a smile.

I see it at the window
Contemplating unhappy bodies
In the skyline
I see it by the river
Washing away the terror
Washed in from all
The junkyards battle-grounds slum-burials
Bleeding revolution.

Your face crowds me at the mortuaries
Defying the nakedness that is prodded
Packed and re-packed into a new
Geometry dreading the old
Dreading any resemblance to the bodies
maddened in the streets
Or to the nakedness tossing serenely
On a bed heaving heat.

Your face smiles at me
When at first rung of chaos
Soldiers carry out a dying wish
Showering bullets into bodies bound
For ever with our hunger
Smashing our essences
Understanding thunder
Jerking wildly on the red sheets
With us watching crescendos spraying
Death-wash into
Our direst wonders.

I see your face
Seeing us mashed into lying
Pounded into hopelessness
Praised into submission
Starved into Inhumanity
Cracked-down into circles
Where we laugh surprised
At our empty affirmations.

I see your face
As I ask kissing the razor's edge
What can we do
In this fear-chamber of our lives?
What can we do
When the lights blink back the darkness
Which seems to stay for ever?
What can we do
When the roads open out the deaths
We will confront at another turning?
What can we do
When the eyes of authority
Spatter blood on the children?
When the cold grey of the evenings
Brings in all the smells
Bearing the deaths
Of so many
Whose lives seemed septic
Who were born saying yes and died
Trying
Trying to find an alternative?
What can we do
When we see the clouds swollen
With the blood of our futures?
What can we say
When poets lie
When politicians never
Tell the secret truths
That sell us
At the world's marketplace?
What can we say
When we know we should
Be doing something
About living our lives in brutal cycles?
The logic belongs to someone else
There is no music here
We have been dancing
On the burning logs
The razor's teeth
The meat of our days
There is no music here.

And when I see your face
See it cry
See it weep the blood we know is ours
See it twitch and grin out our deepest hours
See it transform its beauty
Shocked by the flowering of bodies
Putrescent in our lives
When I see it
I see so many faces in one-
Break this sacrament this heart this fire
Share this body back to its original multitude as we scream into the fumes of the air:

There is no music here
When we are shot there is only an
Illusion of music
Which the frenzy itself transmits
This is no way to live
When we can die
Holding our bodies by the invisible levers
And fight these temples that plague
Our bones:There are no flowers here
We squashed them on other days
As we spun the confusion of our ways
And we must come back
To where the earth is smouldering
To where the smells curl on themselves
To where the flesh is raw at every street-corner
To where the mind is seared by the smell of dawn
To where the spirit tramps the million crevices of fear
To where this old animal stalks starving
To where this old flesh breathes death
To where it is hardest to begin
Where we must scream clarity on chaos
Scream simple terror on complacency
Scream blood on blood Water on water
The pigs drowned yesterday
The prophet went with them
The sea now possesses us.

And do I see your face
Watching this new design
Lifting on each wind?
I know that
When we have been deposited
In this cauldron
Which widens in the smithy's fire

in the electric tremors
when the dawns have become

too much
And widened to each point in our battlegrounds
To each
To each
To each
I know
There will be faces
With yours and mine.

- On his approach to writing

Saturday, February 7, 2009

Cruz Salmerón Acosta "el poeta del martirio"(Cumaná, 1892-1929) - Poeta Venezolano

AZUL

Azul de aquella cumbre tan lejana
hacia la cual mi pensamiento vuela,
bajo la paz azul de la mañana,
¡color que tantas cosas me revela!

Azul que del azul cielo emana,
y azul de este gran mar que me consuela,
mientras diviso en él la ilusión vana
de la visión del ala de una vela.

Azul de los paisajes abrileños,
triste azul de los líricos ensueños,
que no calman los intimos hastíos.

Sólo me angustias cuando sufro antojos
de besar el azul de aquellos ojos
que nunca más contemplarán los míos.

CIELO Y MAR

En este panorama que diseño,
para tormento de mis horas malas,
el cielo dice de ilusión y galas,
el mar discurre de esperanza y sueño.

La libélula errante de mi ensueño
abre la transparencia de sus alas,
con el beso de miel que me regalas
a la caricia de tu amor risueño.

Al extinguirse el último celaje,
copio en mi alma el alma del paisaje
azul de ensueño y verde de añoranza;

y pienso con oscuro pesimismo
que mi ilusión está sobre un abismo
y cerca de otro abismo mi esperanza.