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).



Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Memory (Memoria 2)

Who was this written for? From my Dad's book Twilight theory (Teoría del crepúsculo).

Memory (Memoria 2)

Beautiful vocation of the spirit,
warm memory of a voice,
compass of the senses,
union of the soul.

Negation of what it was:
sun or shadow or angel or demon.
In the silence of her absence
I commemorate the empire
of her memory.

Her name hits me
like a ray of light
that merely touches my skin.
And I feel the distance,
the inhospitable solitude,
denial of the space
that her shadow used to inhabit.

Insomnia
reconstructs the shortness of her life,
the legitimacy of her flags
raised by the noble
adolescent hands.

The secret will persist.
Secret that will tie this story
of loving each other in secret
forever…
or never,
those two ways
of eternalising time.
at 7:38 PM

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