Dame Tu Corazon: Cuatro Poemas

The condor wheels…

The condor wheels,

Currents, warm, rise,

Noon pulsates,

Shadows entice,

Stillness, a wing,

Silence beats the air,

Dusk is solace,

Dawn, fair,

Day transforms,

The moon allures,

Clocks chime—brightly!

—love endures,

Time, a dragonfly,

Solitude, a dove,

I am solitude,

You are love.

Your love is a meal we share…

Your love is a meal we share, stopping as events blink by.

We are waiting trains, rushing travelers hop in and out.

Time slows, a luminous animal patrolling the depths.

We visit the bubble of an artisan polishing a vase.

Sitting down, transfixed by a moment of white jade,

We recall lolling on the sand as the outstretched arm

Of a comet flashed our future across a sable sky.

You sip my glass of wine, swirling it toward your lips.

I scoop toward you heaps of fresh rice steaming fragrant clouds.

We gaze at many dishes, teeming fields quilting a fertile valley.

Reflecting on your quiet life…

Reflecting on your quiet life, I gaze at you in repose, your eyes pearls shaken loose from treetops, silvered.

                                                                    

Rain pelts our roof with pebbles as you drift into sleep, river brushwood rubbing shoulders with land.

Rising and falling, a cloud bumping over a mountain, your white arms. Turning, you exhale deeply. Mist gently pushes back your hair.

Wild brushstrokes of pillows and linens tumble as children, their laughter, bolts of silk, shimmying.

Gazebo freshly planted, you wind your legs and arms about a trellis.

Let us be orchids who widen our filigreed faces, leaves tapering to wax points proffering greetings.

Nodding plants in a circle, we will dine with April as our guest, grasping his warm hands from the vows of dawn until the crown of dusk.

Our lives together...

Our lives together are braided vines.

We scale a wall watered by the sun,

Our roots meet in soil fed by rain.

Your arms in sinuous embrace

Lift us to climb ever higher.

Your eyes are nodding leaves,

Good fortune is the breeze.

Budding forth, your kindnesses

Blossom, imperishable.

Let us bask in the day entering

As liminal shadows open shutters.

When the gardener comes by,

I will ask him to trim our love

So that it intertwines forever.

Mango Vendor (1951) by Fernando Amorsolo

Forbearance is silence…

Forbearance is silence…

Forbearance is silence,

Virtue of the meek.

Silence is complicity,

Oppression of the weak.

Mahatma Gandhi (2010) by Purushotham Adve, Malpe Beach, India

O Beata Solitudo: Duo Poematis

OUR LADY OF THE PHILIPPINES

Trappist Abbey

When the moon climbs the cloudless sky and stillness pours into valleys pooling waters of silence, I rise from sleep to dress, shuffling off loose dreams like a sack.

Stepping outside, I inhale brisk air like snuff—suddenly, I am wakeful, a clock about to spring. I toss out bags of sand to rise more quickly.

In the early chill the mountains stand as guardian shadows and night gleams like dragonfly wings.

I am eager for the work of God beckoning at the end of a solitary path just beyond a row of trees bristling at wind snapping like a flag.

Bits of gravel bite at my soles as turning the corner, I lift up my heart at the sight of light spilling gently from the entrance to the church.

Stepping inside, I am greeted by the bright echo of kneelers knocking the stone floor, and softly rustling pages of stapled paper hymnals.

Gradually, ethereal plainchant rises like a river, gathers itself, solidly transforming into one long sonorous brilliant golden bell.

Brown Madonna (1938) by Galo Ocampo

HERMITS OF BETHLEHEM

Chester, New Jersey

Beyond the threshold is silence.

Stillness suffuses like light.

The world outside is spinning.

Summer flames at its height.

Solitude is a boon companion.

Self-knowledge climbs like a sloth.

The bed is spare, a thin beard.

The rocking chair is a moth.

Dig in a cave in darkness.

Toss out handfuls of soil.

Bake bread in your heart, an oven.

Bring steaming thirst to a boil.

Listen for the least word of power.

Pierce yourself with a sword.

Afternoon deepens day shadows.

The sun is a violent lord.

Dusk emanates blood-red rays.

All trials in an instant will pass.

Gaze upon woods colored jade.

Dream dreams of emerald grass.

Bethlehem—when the trees say nothing

Forbearance is silence…

Forbearance is silence…

Forbearance is silence,

Virtue of the meek.

Silence is complicity,

Oppression of the weak.

Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, Washington, D.C.

The Universe of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy

THE UNIVERSE OF DANTE ALIGHIERI’S DIVINE COMEDY

The purpose of this post is to provide a very brief outline description of the universe of Dante Alighieri’s Divina Commedia. It is written in explanatory support of my poem, “Divina Commedia” at this link:

https://poetryofgonzalinhodacosta.blogspot.com/2014/12/divina-commedia.html 

Dante is a well-known giant of Western literature. In case you don’t know about him, Poetry Foundation provides an excellent write-up at this link:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/dante-alighieri 

Sandro Botticelli’s “Portrait of Dante” below is a likeness based on the poet’s death mask, the original irrecoverably lost.

Image was obtained from this Wikimedia link:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dante_Alighieri's_portrait_by_Sandro_Botticelli.jpg

Portrait of Dante (1495) by Sandro Botticelli

Just a few personal notes. I read Inferno, English translation, when I was in third year high school, parts of Purgatorio and Paradiso sometime afterward. Subsequently, Divina Commedia I took to heart as a marvelous imaginative conception, rich in symbolism, similar in the foregoing respects to Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.” It has many enduring literary merits, among them, characters of deep, lasting emotive power. 

Inspired illustrations have been rendered of Divina Commedia episodes. They are as compelling as the story itself is gripping. Here is one example, Gustave Doré’s illustration for the seventh canto of Inferno, the Circle of Greed, wherein souls damned for the sins of avarice or prodigality roll enormous weights against each other interminably, all the while exclaiming mutual accusations and recriminations. The weights are depicted by Doré as huge moneybags.

Canto VII - The Hoarders and Wasters (1857) by Gustave Doré

Handsomely muscled, Doré’s nudes are visually depilated, presumably to somewhat desexualize them and to advance their ostensibly symbolic meaning.

Interestingly, in the visual arts souls in Hell or Purgatory are usually shown naked, while those in Heaven are clothed in white robes. Both motifs are Biblically based (see comment below).

Musicality of Dante’s vernacular enhances Divina Commedia’s antique allure. If you listen to some very short audio excerpts at the University of Texas at Austin website, for example, the musicality comes through. Visit, for instance:

http://danteworlds.laits.utexas.edu/circle7.html#audio

—Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services, “Circle 7, Cantos 12-17,” The University of Texas at Austin

Audio files of Divina Commedia in the original Italian are readily available on the Internet.

Although I don’t understand Italian, it is not entirely alien since I formally studied the related Romance languages French and Spanish, and Latin.

Now to the task at hand.

Note: Images below are widely available on the Internet. I was unable to trace their original sources, and they might still be under copyright. In any case, I am using them according to the principles of fair use, that is, for the purposes of information and education.

Dante’s universe is geocentric, a spherical earth enclosed in a series of crystalline spheres in which planetary bodies and the stars are embedded. Beyond the outermost sphere, known as Primum Mobile or “first moved,” is an Empyrean dimension, Heaven.

This first graphic shows the tripartite world of Divina Commedia. The pit of Hell is accessed from the earth’s surface—in the story Dante travels directly to the gates of Hell and down a harrowing descent—and from Hell’s bottom exits a passageway emerging into the island of Mount Purgatory, directly opposite Jerusalem on the other side of the spherical earth. At the top of Mount Purgatory is the Biblical Garden of Eden.

This second graphic depicts the transparent spheres enclosing the earth like nested Matryoshka dolls. Primum Mobile, the outermost sphere, revolves under its own power, thereby imparting motion to the inner spheres.

This last graphic is a schematic of Mount Purgatory, clearly showing the seven stories of Thomas Merton’s famous mountain. His autobiography apparently conceives of his life before he joined the Trappists as a principally purgative stage, in allusion to Saint Bonaventure’s “The Triple Way,” among others. Presumably, Merton’s entrance into the monastery would mark his embarkation upon the illuminative and unitive phases principally, of the spiritual life.

If this post incites your interest in exploring further Divina Commedia, all’s well then.

In this pursuit, you might want to visit Dr. Norman Prinsky’s notes here:

http://spots.gru.edu/nprinsky/Humn2001/DANTE-NQ.htm