‘The Territory of Loss’

By Daniel Torres
Translated by Freda Barron

“Poetry is the territory of loss, and that assumption condemns the poet to a constant vigil.”– Eduardo Milán

Lost for the love of letters; they injected me with the habit of life that my enthusiasm so desperately needs to keep me afloat. What would become of me if I didn’t have you? I would be someone insignificant, like those who have once made me feel pity. With jazz and these words, my innermost self reclaims the thirst of the primal me, the first of all; the Word, like Adam assigning names to all living creatures, rivers and seas he saw, to the fruits, the mountains, plateaus and valleys. Adam is the first poet, also the first to be cursed.

As for me, I have always preferred to be one of those, another Adam, naming the things around me, sprinkling them with words, filling them with stories and tales; always eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, not letting myself be seduced by the serpent, listening to it, ignoring it, perhaps only sometimes letting it in and nourishing myself with its words.

Lost for the love of letters like Solomon, filled with songs within, flooded by the longing to always keep the pen with me, memories of a not-so-distant past flowing from my left hand of a more poetic country of my own, of a reality of mine filled with sighs into the air, where the everyday becomes poetic imagination.

My calling has always been creation, the act of imagining it differently, of capturing that scene of the child and his father on the bus, of a father teaching his son to read. The transmission of knowledge as a memory is not what makes it poetry; that very action itself is poetry, living poetry. Starting from that and achieving the creative act, having enough subtlety, the instinct, that thing some call a gift, is what turns that poetic act in itself — invisible to the eyes of the insignificant being — into a visible poetic act; a translation from one being to another, a bridge between realities, a love for letters, a poetic love, the true love, a cursed love, forever condemned.

Forever condemned to a constant vigil, with that filter of imaginary reality. Along the way, many decide to start ignoring the filter, they discard it, they set it aside, overlooking the fragrance that certain events emanate. Always nourishing themselves with experiences, with life itself, so that the poet can continue with the arduous task, with an endless stream of translations and interpretations of the moments themselves, like revealing the negatives of a photograph, which later everyone can see and understand. So that everyone can see the poet and poetry.


Look at Me

By Kitty Riley
Carbondale

Hey, look at me.

Up here. Top of the pole.

I’m waving at you.

Do you see who I am?

A symbol with stars, stripes and a square;

With red, white and blue.

Not just one shape.

Not just one color.

A pattern of differences.

An echo of you.

Be proud of who you are.