Ojo en la tinta New poetry from Colombia's Raiz Invertida poetry collective

František Kupka, El desafío (El ídolo negro), 1903

Memorial del árbol

Article and translation of poems by Kevin Barker

By Henry Alexander Gómez

Born in Bogotá (1982), Henry is the founder and director of the Festival de Narrativa y Poesía, Ojo en la Tinta (Eye in the ink). His poems appear in the short Colombian poetry samplers Piedras en el trópico (2011), (Stones in the tropics) and Raíces del viento (2011), (Roots of the wind). His most recent book, Memorial del Árbol, is being published shortly.

There are suns that fall

An angel toys in the branches of the tree.

It is so great, the abyss

and so quiet, the roof of the world

that we embrace its grief,

and we drink aguardiente,

and we cry,

because we do not understand

how God plays with his stone fingers

among the poplar leaves¬

Lovers

She walks through the streets squandering her nakedness

and later drinks a field of logs,

silenced by fire.

He sneaks into the cinema of the afternoon

and cries with shoes in the air.

A valley of campaigns.

A fly buzzes morbund among old papers.

the rain falls on a guitar abandoned in the desert.

The devil said he would take us home¬

Jaguar

"...in the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?".

 - William Blake.

The enigma of its skins surprises me again

at the hour of death.

Again, the dawn undermining anguish

and the terrible secrets; I have dreamed a blind jaguar

giving birth to the thousands of mirrors that preceded him

from the first tiger of Adam in paradise

a labyrinth of black pearls, of black rings of fire,

shaded strokes of black jade,

in the golden ivory that underlies the gloom

of the untamed jungle.

What immortal vision? What mystery hides your flesh?

Your flaming blind eyes follow me still

in the darkness of my steps to the tomb,

like a stone of immutable gold

in the comfort of Allah's desert firmament.

I dreamed him a thousand and one nights in this eternal dawn

I dreamed him in the form of the tiger, the lynx, the leopard,

in the form of the puma, the lion, and the imposing panther.

I dreamed him in the infamous face of the hunter

and in the bloody face of the sorcerer.

I dreamed him on the altar of the blood of a race

that venerated the terrible symmetry of the universe.

I dreamed him wooing, in the afternoon of a dead tree,

and devouring a man under the Amazonian flood

from the hand of Poe and Blake I dreamed also of Tzinacán1

in his closed hemisphere, deciphering the scriptures of God

in his indecipherable skin.

(Fragment)

                       

Taken from:

http://www.fleefundamentalism.com/notion.html

Henry Alexander Gómez

Memorial del árbol (2012)