Sagacious alchemist (Pocimera ladina)

A cry for help.  As a child I couldn’t hear my Dad’s cry for help.  All I saw was a big, strong, smiley, wise and generous man, who knew everything and what to do.  Someone who was respected by his peers, students and employees, loved by his wife and kids, feared by criminals.  It is only now, decades later, after life has given me plenty of opportunities to experience some of the feelings he portrays in his poetry, that I understand him.  I wish I could have done something to ease his pain, I wish I knew exactly what pained him, I wish he had told me.  From Dad’s book The celebrated afternoon (La tarde festejada). 

Sagacious alchemist (Pocimera ladina)

Once upon a time

you possessed me, Depression,

you were the mistress of my joy,

tyrant of my freedom,

feeder

of my fears.

You left

and I thought

it would be forever,

but you tend to come back

in multiple disguises;

you jump like a spark

in the imagination

and you colonise me again.

You enter me without making a fuss,

sagacious alchemist witch.

You arrive unexpectedly.  I feel you

in my unsociable mood,

in my silence, in the voids

that materialise in my world.

I feel the blood freeze;

and an indescribable pain

runs through the arteries

of my brain, through all the

veins that irrigate me, and descends

down the spine, descends;

an icy river drowns

my being and hits all my bones.

Go away Depression,

despicable and deceitful shadow.

Do not touch my faith, let me

believe that with the morning sun

you will leave me.

My bones and my soul

and my spirit will return

to that point where I left

the joy of living, the reason

for living.  And I will breathe again

the merciful air

of God.