Elementary motherland – To Colombia (Patria elemental – A Colombia)

Today I had to do a little more research than usual. Although the names Manuela de Omaña y Rodríguez and Juan Agustín Santander Colmenares sounded familiar, I had to dust off some memories from primary school and look them up. They were the hero Francisco de Paula Santander y Omaña’s parents.  Mr Santander was a farmer and land owner from San José de Cúcuta, who in his 50s moved to Villa del Rosario and married a young widow, Ms Omaña y Rodríguez, heiress from one of the most prominent families in the region.

From my Dad’s book Variations for an epopee (Variaciones para una epopeya).

Elementary motherland – To Colombia (Patria elemental – A Colombia)

Now you will be able to recognise the land

where you Aries were born,

the calm rivers that irrigate it,

the green planes laying under the sun

of a perpetual summer in blue sky.

You will remember the house and the fertile cacao plantations

and through the impenetrable mystery

of your imaginary eyes,

the preserved faces of time will pass…

Mrs Manuela de Omaña y Rodríguez

will govern the fortress of your heart,

and Mr Juan Agustín Santander Colmenares

will praise her demanding mastery

in the education of FRANCISCO DE PAULA,

the human creation demanded by ancestral commands

of blood and the land.

A new era will begin, and when you return,

in the eternity of your glory,

you will feel the rural joy of the town,

you will remember your friends from childhood

and adolescence

and you will re-live your creation, step by step,

from when you discovered the imprecise boundary

where freedom and fear mix up.

The Elementary Motherland, the beautiful Motherland

of the early years of life

which reach does not go beyond the horizon

and is like an intimate Motherland.

The flesh and blood heroes

also have their small Motherland

where people say everyday

“good morning” and mark the beginning of dawn

with their hard-working hands.