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).



Tuesday, March 29, 2011

And I lost the air one day in the air (Y perdí un día el aire con el aire)

To HTH with all my love and gratitude from my Dad’s book Boundaries (Confines). 

And I lost the air one day in the air (Y perdí un día el aire con el aire)
Perla Rotzzit

I started losing things. 
Inevitably they fell one after the other
like that now far away Autumn that we lived
in retreat and love: The days escaped
with a hurry that they did not deserve.

Remember how we used to wake up
every morning under different suns and weather?
I started getting lonely
and even the words were taken away from me.
Now, sometimes all I find close by
is silence.

In this disability of my memory
you are the one thing left.  From everything I have lost
a lot of you hits my impatience.
But you persist, simple, complete, one whole,
like something so mine, so absolute,
essence and accident.  Except for You,
who equals Me, I have nothing left.
at 5:29 PM

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