Sweet Maria Loynaz, Cuban poet, was born on this day in 1902 in Havana. She was a member of the Royal Spanish Academy and president of its subsidiary in Cuba and her work and work were recognized with many awards and honors, among others the Cervantes Prize in 1992 and the Isabel la Católica Prize for journalism, in Spain, and the Félix Varela cultural order and the National Literature Prize in Cuba. We remember her with this selection of poems Of his work.
Dulce María Loynaz — Poems
Roses
In my garden there are roses:
I don't want to give you the roses
that tomorrow...
tomorrow you won't have
In my garden there are birds
with glass edges:
I won't give them to you,
who have wings to fly…
In my garden bees
they carve fine honeycomb:
Sweetness of a minute…
I don't want to give it to you!
For you the infinite or nothing;
the immortal or this mute sadness
that you won't understand...
The nameless sadness of not having to give
to those who carry something of eternity on their forehead…
Leave, leave the garden...
Don't touch the rose bush:
the things that die
They should not be touched.
The blue pitcher
At sunset I will go
with my blue jug to the river,
to collect the last
shadow of my landscape.
At sunset the water
will reflect it very vaguely;
with sky clarity
and lake clarity…
For the last time the water
It will reflect my landscape.
I will hold her gently
like someone picking up a piece of lace...
They will be at sunset
these things are further away...
Further and sweeter,
sweeter and fuzzier.
Then... Let the night come!
That the tenuousness of the dream is already
-of forgotten dream-
the delicate, gray, sedate
of old fabric... and the fine,
the transparent tulle…
They will be a single tremor
inside the blue jug!
Desire
May life not go beyond your arms.
That I can fit with my verse in your arms,
May your arms surround me whole and trembling
without neither my sun nor my shadow staying outside.
May your arms be my horizon and path,
short path, and only horizon of flesh;
May life not go further... May death
looks like this hot death in your arms!…
The Creation
And first was the water:
a hoarse water,
without breathing fish, without shores
that they squeezed it...
It was the water first,
about a world being born from the hand of God…
It was the water...
Still
The land did not appear between the waves,
still the earth
It was just a soft, trembling mud...
There were no moonflowers or clusters
of islands… In the belly
Continents were created from young water...
Dawn of the world, awakening
of the world!
What to put out the last fires!
What a sea on fire under the black sky!
It was water first.
Love is…
Loving delicate grace
of the blue swan and the pink rose;
love the light of dawn
and that of the stars that open
and the one with the smiles that lengthen…
Loving the fullness of the tree,
love the music of water
and the sweetness of the fruit
and the sweetness of sweet souls….
Loving what is kind is not love:
Love is putting on a pillow
for the tiredness of every day;
it's sunset alive
in the desire of the blind seed
that lost the direction of the light,
imprisoned by her land,
defeated by her own land…
Love is untangling tangles
of paths in the darkness:
Love is being a path and being a scale!
Love is this loving that hurts us,
what bleeds deep inside us…
It is entering the depths of the night
and guess the budding star...
The hope of the star!…
Love is loving from the black root.
Love is forgiving;
and what is more than forgiving,
is to understand...
Love is holding on to the cross,
and nail himself to the cross,
and die and rise again...
Love is resurrection!
Eternity
In my garden there are roses
I don't want to give you
the roses that tomorrow...
tomorrow you won't have
In my garden there are birds
with glass edges:
I won't give them to you, what do they have?
wings to fly…
In my garden bees
they carve fine honeycomb
Sweetness of a minute…
I don't want to give it to you!
For you the infinite
or nothing; the immortal
or this silent sadness
that you won't understand...
The nameless sadness
of not having to give
or who wears on his forehead
some eternity...
Leave, leave the garden...
don't touch the rose bush:
The things that die
They should not be touched.
detachment
Sweetness of feeling increasingly distant.
Farther and vaguer...
Without knowing if it is because things are going away
or it is one who leaves.
Sweetness of oblivion like a light dew falling in the darkness...
Sweetness of feeling clean of everything.
Sweetness of rising and being like the inaccessible and high star,
lighting in silence...
Silent,
My God!…