It had been raining, the day with the Indigenous people living in the Park has been emotional. Two colleagues needed help, one talked about her husband and the other one was carted away by the Ambulance to the nearest hospital suspected of a heart attack.
I decided to leave the clinic and it was raining. Driving slowly but still enjoying this scenery that I have seen many times, lines of poems began to appear in my head.
I recorded them as they came into my head. there is noise of the air conditioning of the car and also the windshield wipers. but I enjoyed recording what was occurring in my head, a rather spontaneous oration.
(when I am able to upload the spoken words , i will do so )
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tn4KpP9BGmvNHrOU6xFt_3NIutHtuL22/view?usp=sharing
I mention two poems in this narration
Josie Bliss
This is how Pablo Neruda recalls in his memoirs, 'I confess that I have lived', to the girl from whom he fled months later, she crazy with love, he with so much fear of his passion that he left without saying goodbye at dawn. He barely left a note. Months later he wrote that mismatch in the poem 'Tango del viudo', which starts with the shame of the fugitive: 'Oh Maligna, you have already found the letter, you have already cried in fury, / and you have insulted my mother's memory / calling her a bitch rotten and mother of dogs, / you have already drunk alone, alone, the afternoon tea / looking at my old empty shoes forever, / and you can no longer remember my illnesses, my night dreams, my meals / without cursing me out loud as if I was still there ... '
The poem Josie Bliss has special meaning for me. I remember walking behind my brother along the RIver Irrawady in Bagan in Burma and reciting this poem
Also once in the pine infested forest in Northern Finnish Lappland near Ivalo, while looking for the guest house to spend the night, I had this book of poems by Neruda and I sang it aloud to the trees and the silence that inspired Sibelius.
Loves: Josie Bliss (I)
What became of the furious one?
It was war
burning
the gilded city
that drowned her, so that neither
her written threats
nor her electric blasphemies could get out
to find me again, to persecute me
as they did so many days, in that faraway place,
so many hours
that time and oblivion
took care of, one by one,
until, at last, she can be named as death,
death, bad word, black earth
in which Josie Bliss
will rest in her rage.
She would add up
my absent years
wrinkle by wrinkle, as they probably gathered
on her face from the grief I gave her;
because she was waiting for me on the other side of the world.
I never came, but in the empty
cups,
in the dead dining room,
maybe my silence wasted away,
my faraway footsteps,
and maybe until death she saw me
as if through water,
as if I were swimming in glass,
slow of movement,
and she couldn't take hold of me
and would lose me
every day, in the pale lagoon
on which her gaze was fixed.
Until she finally closed her eyes -
when was that?
Until time and death covered her over -
when was that?
Until hate and love bore her away -
where?
Until she who loved me in rage,
in blood, in revenge,
in jasmines,
couldn't go on talking to herself,
gazing at the lagoon of my absence.
Now, maybe,
she rests restlessly
in the great cemetery in Rangoon,
or maybe on the banks
of the Irrawaddy they burned her body
all afternoon, while
the river murmured
things that I might have said to her in tears.
Ahora bien,
These two are some of poems of Neruda that I adore
Under the dim street lights outside the humble abode in Gordon Town in Jamaica, a steep drive from the cacophony of the downtown, I gently whispered this poem..
Today is the Day of the Dead
but where are the Living Dead
I shall no longer look for them , let them bundle their kisses and hugs and take them to the great cemetery of kisses in the sky.
This corner, Dalhousie and Brooking street still exist in Rangoon now called Yangon. I have stood there,a this very same corner hoping a ghost of some local who knew Neruda would offer me a salaam.
This is one of his poems, Rangoon, 1927:
“I came late to Rangoon. Everything was already there -- a city of blood, dreams and gold, a river that flowed from the savage jungle into the stifling city and its leprous streets, and a white hotel for whites, and a golden pagoda for the golden people. That's what went on and didn't go on. Rangoon, steps wounded by the spitters of betel juice.”
LET US FORGIVE WITH GENEROSITY THOSE WHO CANNOT LOVE US
THOSE WHO DESERVE TO BE FORGOTTEN ARE FORGOTTEN EASILY
