By León Santillán
Translated by Sandra F. (2024)
The poet has the need to express the pristine longing of his soul. Otherwise, he will experiment the uneasiness that comes from a veiled truth.
A phrase that I did not articulate and that foundered in silence.
Emptiness in the paper and the soul because I did not dare to write.
The bitter flavour of an unexpressed intention.
I interweave with dreams, a story that becomes reality, because life itself is a dream.
So why do you refuse to dream and elude happiness?
Don’t you see that the future is a haze, and the past is no more?
If we look back, what we loved yesterday is no longer there today.
Longing for the future, what we love is gone.
Clinging to the present, we foretaste freedom.
Look at your hands and you will see that they only vacuity hold.
You suffer because what you used to have, you no longer have. And what you once had, and now no longer have, is more needed by you than when you had it before.
Or you believed you possessed.
What you look forward to in the future, just fantasy is. A soap bubble that will explode into nothingness when your hands want to grab it.
Loving God and insatiable Moloch, the almighty ‘Time’ generously offers you his rich gifts and, in an instant, snatches them from you without any compassion.
Therefore, do not cling stubbornly to the ephemeral and insubstantial. Only the fool considers that may there is something imperishable, something that remains immutable in the curse of time.
Time gives you everything and takes it all.
Sylphs in the air whisper in my ear.
Undines of the water caress my soul.
Salamanders of fire incinerate my anxieties and goblins of the earth feed my reveries.
Are they the ravings of a feverish imagination?
How can you know, having never been silent or quiet enough to hear their ethereal voices?
You did not present your body, or your mind with unconcerned repose.
You did not stop to contemplate in child astonishment the sparking bonfire.
You did not feel on your bare feet the inaudible murmur of earth.
You did not refresh your fatigue on the crystal clear water of the spring.
There are marvellous gifts that you do not perceive, wonders you do not feel and textures you don’t touch.
So the frost of tedium had frozen your ears.
The hardness of your soul numbed your body and senses.
Icy reasoning froze the flame of your life.
‘Life is a dream,’ says the poet, and the philosopher reiterates it.
But in order for there to be dreams, a dreamer is needed.
What if the dreamer awake? What new world will he or she stay up over?
‘That is just poetry’, the stony materialists will say disdainfully.
‘Only poetry’, as it with that they minimized the singing of the muses.
Without poetry, what are man and woman if not pieces of disposable matter?
What is the beauty of a woman but poetry?
The archetypal beauty of a woman is poetry.
Come back to poetry if you wish to return to the unconcerned splendour of childhood.
Make an altar for the life and offer your foolish pride up to obtain the treasure of hidden serenity.
Poetry is a heaven’s gift that enables us to cope with the rigors of a meaningless life.
Writer and journalist. Musician and artist. Ninjutsu Sensei. Director of Canon Magazine, Canon Conservatorio, and Bonsai Center Argentina.
