‘A Heart Is What Moves The World’

“It may be true that a heart is what moves the world” - Dámaso Alonso

Dámaso Alonso y Fernández de las Redondas, born in Spain on Oct. 22, 1898 was a poet, professor and literary critic who studied Law, Philosophy and Literature, became a leading writer for literary magazines like Western Review and The Four Winds, and taught Spanish language and literature at leading universities – including Oxford – around the globe.

His long poem, Children of Wrath, has been lauded as one of the major literary works of the post-Spanish Civil War.  His later poetry – up to his death in 1990 – is filled with agnostic anguish of a man in search of God yet fearful of the implications were God not to exist.   For his lifetime body of work, he was awarded the Premio Cervantes, the Spanish literary world's highest honor.  For Saturday’s Poem from Children of Wrath, here is Alonso's,

 

            Insomnia

Madrid is a city with more than a million corpses
(according to the latest statistics).

Sometimes at night I toss and turn and sit up within this burial niche where I’ve been rotting for the last 45 years,
and I spend long hours listening to the hurricane’s howling, or to dogs’ barking, or the moon’s bland shimmer and flow.

And I spend long hours howling like the hurricane, barking like a mad dog, flowing like milk out of a big yellow cow’s warm udder.

And I spend long hours asking God, asking him why my soul rots away, ever so slowly,
why is it that more than a million corpses are decaying in this city of Madrid,
why a billion corpses slowly languish in the world.

Tell me, which orchard do you intend to fertilize with our putrefaction?
Do you fear per chance that the rose-bushes of your days will dry up,
or that the sad, lethal asphodels of your nights will?

   

 

 

 

Share Writer’s A Moment with friends

Writersmoment.blogspot.com/