Colombia

From my Dad’s book Variations for an epopee (Variaciones para una epopeya), celebrating 201 years since the Colombian Declaration of Independence, which took place on the 20^th of July, 1810, in Santa Fé de Bogota.

Colombia

And this small Nation started growing

at the pace of your glory. In the Epopee

it was nourishing mother of heroes and martyrs.

In its womb the liberator campaign

found the symmetry

of order and law living together.

Here the Liberator forged an eminent Nation

of broad frontiers and different climates,

as great as the horizons

of its countless roads,

thought, imagined, built

over a horse’s gallop.

If on the walls its undiscovered dreams

could be read,

your Elementary Motherland would be the

convergent centre of Colombia,

the one of the year 21,

which six flags flap with the wind

at the tip of the flagpole.

Your Nation grew at the pace of your glory.

The promise that you made

under the temple’s dome,

allowed the sward to rest

and committed the lawyers’ robe.

Between the great passions

that infected with melancholy

the first rays of light in the dawn of freedom,

you did not avoid dangers, you were always

either on the helmet of the galley slaves

with shackles and chains

or you were the timoneer that drove

with the same skill under the storms

as on the calm seas.