The design (Designio)

One year ago I decided to pay tribute to my father by translating his literary work into English and sharing it on a blog with my world. What an experience! I learnt so much more about my best friend, my hero, my role model. I cried, I laughed, I struggled with words, but I did it. Thank you to those who read some of his poems, you helped me keep him alive, and hopefully he made you feel alive by awakening any kind of feeling in your heart.

This is it, the last poem of ‘mydadspoetry2011.blogspot.com’, from his book The celebrated afternoon (La tarde festejada).

HAPPY NEW YEAR 2012!!!

The design (Designio)

You who return

from beyond the shadow,

from the outside,

from silence and solitude,

who comes from the deep abysses

where scorpions conceive

with sperm of hatred,

who inhabited the fictitious night

of the wetlands

and were tenant of the rain,

of the infected swamps,

of the deaf jungle noise,

of the mystery, of desperation

and madness,

you who walked wandering

on roads that you did not deserve

toward inexistent horizons,

you must tell us where it is

the invulnerable place of men,

the critical point,

the untouched Achilles' heel

that cannot be tarnished

by the shadows

nor silence or solitude or the abysses

or the rain or the blind sun

or the unlikely roads

or desperation or madness.

Which will be the secret lamp

that in the stubborn darkness

does not tire or extinguishes

and lights up the remote places where

the terminal points of man

and the sources of his anguish nest?

Where does the invincible energy live?

Energy that allows such fragile creature

survive under the weight of moral predicaments

and multiply its patience to wait for

the birth of light

between prejudice and darkness.

I ask you, my brother,

because I have loved life since the luminous days

and the nights radiant with stars.

I ask you because I only know

the surface of what you knew,

and I find in every drop of dew

the sign of God and in every rose that blossoms

I find the expression of hallelujah of his mercy.

Your silence anointed with tears

is yelling the answer.

My Lord, you are the foundation

where man can affirm himself

without annoyance or danger.

Nothing of what exists in Nature

can hold

the ethereal, magic and turbulent weight

that in an instant falls like a tombstone

over the scraps of our will.

In a moment of our path

we become a memory,

something that is not anymore,

something that once was

and is not now and will never be

in our confusion.

You are THE ONLY ONE that as quicksilver

take the shapes of the minimal cracks

to penetrate the most secret place

where the soul that thinks of you hides.

Or you arrive like a flash of lighting

and a spark falls off you

like a firefly dispossessed of its wings

and fires up the mysterious paths of the brain

to warm up with the heat of your mercy

the almost dead embryos

of Hope and Faith.

You arrive steadily in the middle of the night

and your pour out like the dew over the fields

without them feeling your presence.

And one morning at the first light of dawn

the imprisoned foretells that you are close.

Perhaps you took some of the gifts

that you gave us in abundance

to use them in other causes

and we did not understand your message…

Oh God of the clay

who shaped sadness

and the quiet days

and happiness

and bliss

and tenderness

and sorrow

let me understand the paths

that your infinite hands design

and help me in the hour that only you know,

the hour to ascend to the eternal reality where you live!