The Poetry of Julia de Burgos - Listening Guide
To Julia de Burgos
People now murmur that I am your enemy
For they claim that in verses
I reveal your essence to the world.
They lie, Julia de Burgos. They lie Julia de Burgos.
The voice uplifted in my verses is not your own: it is mine,
For you are garment and I essence;
And the greatest abyss lies between the two.
You are the cold-blooded puppet of social deceit,
And I, the driving splendor of human truth.
You, of courtesan hypocrisies ... the honey; not I;
Whose heart is revealed in my poems ... all.
You are like your world, selfish; not I;
Who dares all to be what I truly am.
You are merely the implacable, elegant lady;
Not I; I am life, I am strength, I am woman.
You belong to your husband, to your master; not I;
I belong to no one, or to everyone, because to all,
everyone,
In wholesome feeling and thought, I give myself.
You curl your locks and paint yourself, not I;
I am curled by the wind; brightened by the sun.
You are homebound, resigned, submissive,
Confined to the whims of men; not I;
I am Rocinante galloping recklessly
Wandering through the boundaries of God's justice.
You are not in command of self; everyone rules you:
You are ruled by your husband, your parents, relatives,
The priest, the seamstress, theater, club,
The car, jewels, the banquet, champagne,
Heaven and hell and ... social hearsay.
But not me, I am ruled by my heart alone,
My sole thought; it is "I" who rules myself.
You, aristocratic blossom; and I, the people's blossom.
You are well provided for, but are indebted to everyone,
While I, my nothingness to no one owe.
You, nailed to the stagnant ancestral dividend;
And I, but one digit in the social cipher.
We are the encroaching, inevitable duel to the death.
When the multitude uncontrolled runs,
The ashes of injustices, burnt, left behind,
And when with the torch of the seven virtues,
The throng to the seven sins gives chase,
I will be against you and against all
That is unjust and inhuman.
Upholding the torch ... I shall be among the throng.
Rio Grande de Loíza
Rio Grande de Loíza! ... Stay in my spirit
and let my soul get lost in your streams,
to find the source that stole you as a child
and in a mad rush he returned you to the path.
Curl up on my lips and let me drink you
to feel mine for a brief moment,
and hide from the world, and hide yourself,
and hear voices of wonder, in the mouth of the wind.
Get off the back of the earth for a moment,
and seek the intimate secret of my anxieties;
confuse me in the flight of my fantasy bird,
and leave me a rose of water in my dreams.
Rio Grande de Loíza! .. My spring, my river,
since the maternal petal rose to the world;
with you they came down from the rough slopes
to search for new furrows, my pale yearnings;
and my childhood was a whole poem on the river,
and a river in the poem of my first dreams.
Adolescence arrived. Life surprised me
caught in the width of your eternal journey;
and I was yours a thousand times, and in a beautiful romance
you woke up my soul and kissed my body.
Where did you take the waters that bathed
my forms, spike of the newly opened sun?
Who knows in what remote Mediterranean country
some faun on the beach will be possessing me!
Who knows in what downpour from what distant land
I will be spilling to open new furrows;
or if anything, tired of biting hearts,
I'll be freezing into ice crystals!
Rio Grande de Loíza! Blue, Brown, Red.
Blue mirror, fallen blue piece of the sky;
naked white flesh that turns black
every time the night gets into your bed;
Red streak of blood, when the rain comes down
the hills vomit its mud into torrents.
River man, but man with river purity,
because you give your blue soul when you give your blue kiss.
Dear sir, my river. River man. Only man
who has kissed my soul by kissing my body.
Rio Grande de Loíza! ... Rio Grande. Big cry.
The greatest of all our island cries,
If the one that comes out of me wasn't bigger
through the eyes of the soul for my slave people.