In the middle of a busy life, at times the wind dies down. You look at the blue gray clouds at the world's rim, and you hear, in the sudden lull, a faint rending sound, like when you strain a too old, too tight shirt. It is the sound of the universe ripping.
The ripping happens all the time. The cemeteries are full of its testimonials. The hospitals brim and tip with it. It hangs, listless, on all the missing faces tacked up in Walmart. It trickles, stinging, through all our everyday abrasions, and echoes down the phone line in a strained voice, desperately matter-of-fact.
And we chant stories to sooth ourselves in this alarm; we rattle about, making noise and forgetting. We say at least we have memories, at least we still have someone, at least lives leave legacies, at least there remains honor and bravery, at least, at least . . . .
But it doesn't matter--none of it matters. Unless, unless, God is.
God is. God is.
See us here, God? Our cracked hearts, our crumbling heavens? Wake us to the reverberations of that other rending: the holiest place brought near through a broken cloth, a broken body. Remind us about birth pangs.
So true and well-said!
ReplyDeleteElena, Do you kinow the poetry of Ruben Dario, from Nicaragua?
ReplyDeleteTO ROOSEVELT
It is with the voice of the Bible, or the verse of Walt Whitman,
that I should come to you, Hunter,
primitive and modern, simple and complicated,
with something of Washington and more of Nimrod.
You are the United States,
you are the future invader
of the naive America that has Indian blood,
that still prays to Jesus Christ and still speaks Spanish.
You are the proud and strong exemplar of your race;
you are cultured, you are skillful; you oppose Tolstoy.
And breaking horses, or murdering tigers,
you are an Alexander-Nebuchadnezzar.
(You are a professor of Energy
as today's madmen say.)
You think that life is fire, t
hat progress is eruption,
that wherever you shoot
you hit the future.
No.
The United States is potent and great.
When you shake there is a deep tremblor
that passes through the enormous vertebrae of the Andes.
If you clamor, it is heard like the roaring of a lion.
Hugo already said it to Grant: The stars are yours.
(The Argentine sun, ascending, barely shines,
and the Chilean star rises...) You are rich.
You join the cult of Hercules to the cult of Mammon,
and illuminating the road of easy conquest,
Liberty raises its torch in New York.
But our America, that has had poets
since the ancient times of Netzahualcoyotl,
that has walked in the footprints of great Bacchus
who learned Pan's alphabet at once;
that consulted the stars, that knew Atlantis
whose resounding name comes to us from Plato,
that since the remote times of its life
has lived on light, on fire, on perfume, on love,
America of the great Montezuma, of the Inca,
the fragrant America of Christopher Columbus,
Catholic America, Spanish America,
the America in which noble Cuahtemoc said:
"I'm not in a bed of roses"; that America
that trembles in hurricanes and lives on love,
it lives, you men of Saxon eyes and barbarous soul.
And it dreams. And it loves, and it vibrates, and it is the daughter of the Sun.
Be careful. Viva Spanish America!
There are a thousand cubs loosed from the Spanish lion.
Roosevelt, one would have to be, through God himself,
the-fearful Rifleman and strong Hunter,
to manage to grab us in your iron claws.
And, although you count on everything, you lack one thing: God!
Rubén Darío, 1904
Translated by Bonnie Frederick
A beautiful and poignant meditation, Elena. Thank you.
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