Declaration of Guiltiness to the Senate


I

Politics is not

the last poet’s sky.

Not that fruit of the abyss

that reasonably absorbs

the pure dart, the untamed dream.

To submit to its weightless

fire discipline,

faithful to the letter to the bitter end,

drove the Egypt Sotades to end —so it’s said—

inside a box cast out to sea.

He had seen and touched —but put it down in verse—

the twilight of the despot.

Such voices are shorten by chance

to end isolated at bottom

that’s not oblivion yet

—though neither eternity—,

where they lose the vertical instinct,

communication.


II

Police cycles

under the sun disk

haven’t turned ripe

the sweetest wheat fields.

They have been separating,

instead, distil

the sour inner soil like a dim orchard

where fine smell wounds

bear with so good aspect.

Without risks, provided, the prophet

comes and lifts in time

the arch of his attention

farther

and farther from the dust.


III

From the repudiation to the shipwreck, to death, to that trail

left by politics,

arises this peace which is the heart in a fist.

This peace of incontestable conscience

to never be concerned about uncertain stings,

nor to become furious because of disparities

of pain, the lies or the injustice

—in the swarms threw on swarms—.

The circle infinity we must set before

a tiny truth,

transported not even on one of these hands.

The mirror stares at us

as at dark parasites.

To polish / To discard?

To desert / To flee?

We have only deeds,

minor cowardice:

literary techniques.

The failure, the circular sense

of each human phrase that has entered nature

just as a machine

can demolish and from inside arrive to harmony.

It was a live language

that of transcendence, the language of the mute.


IV

If Icarus had been

forgiven, turned aside from that obsession

of trespassing the light.

If he can return

and take place at a side

or above his deeds.

If his eyes are allowed

to wear away by the advance study

of what it was, what went wrong…

If Icarus occupies one day

his seat by God’s anvil

and attain to hammer

and to try and to choose

between chains of deeds and words…

To choose the fathomless perfection of the lost.

To choose the possible and consistent space

as the core of the inward afternoons

or the oblivion outside the labyrinth…

He should never accept, he is never to consent

someone to repeat in his stead

or hardly to remember the darken contingency

in which the eternal buzz of poetry

squashes,

humiliates and waits inside something

unbearably exact

like a

box

in

the

bottom

of

the sea.


Words in the Outdoors. Contemporary Cuban Social Poetry, Selection and prologue by Pedro Llanes and Silvia Padrón Jomet. Translated by Edelmis Anoceto Vega.



Opiniones

Norges Espinosa
Escritor

«Palabras que se hilvanan a través de sonetos, décimas […] y de un verso libre que gana sus mejores momentos en poemas tan ceñidos y seguros de su humildad».

«La poesía de Francis Sánchez es una revelación dentro de las letras cubanas, y una voz que viene a sumarse a las grandes voces jóvenes en el ámbito internacional».

«Poesía que entronca directamente con la gran poesía del siglo de oro español, de una riqueza rítmica y expresiva impresionante. Poesía que muestra muy a las claras un vasto conocimiento de la literatura clásica, hispana y no hispana […] que otorga —y exige— a cada poema una lectura detenida y pausada».

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