Why do this?

My father, José Luis Villamizar Melo, passed away in my home town of Cúcuta, Colombia, in August last year. The law and economics were Dad's profession, but literature, history and academia his passion. He wrote and published several books, articles and book chapters. The thing is that so many people have missed out on his work, particularly on his beautiful poetry, which he wrote in Spanish prior to the world wide web. So I thought, what a better way to keep Dad's legacy alive than to bring his writing beyond his world and share it with mine. That is why I am translating over 250 of my Dad's poems to English and publishing them here, one a day, Monday to Friday during 2011 (Dad, a family man, always believed that you shouldn't work on weekends).



Friday, February 11, 2011

Your heart, just like that (Así tu corazón)

My Dad was definitively a hopeless romantic.  Here is a pearl from his book Boundaries (Confines).

Your heart, just like that (Así tu corazón)

I may have given you everything
a rose in stem and thorn
some love sorrow
and honest companionship.
But you gave me
your whole heart
without shadows or moderation
and the certainty
that your pure hands
only met
the rose in stem and thorn
taken from my hands.

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