Postcards

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SOriz211
Posts: 65
Joined: 02 Jan 2017, 01:02

Postcards

#1 Post by SOriz211 » 20 Mar 2017, 01:51

Postcards
Yo fui la más callada
de todas las que hicieron el viaje hasta tu Puerto.
Julia de Burgos, Yo Fui la Mas Callada



Willie, when Eloy showed me the wedding rings
I broke out in tears. I was so innocent, didn’t even know
why I followed you to Bolivia.


2.
Write me a poem that will bring me back to life, papi.
Be my distraction, or I am going to find a tall, blue eyed angel
with baker hands and lips like James Dean.

A dormir se van ahora mis lagrimas
por donde tu cruzaste mi verso.



3.
Negro, I’ve murdered myself so many times the effort is starting to hurt.
Someone stole my poetry. They wanted to teach me to write on paper.
As if everything I do isn’t already written in blood.
I begged mama to help me die, but she refused,
had to slash my own wrist.

Todos los ojos del viento
ya me lloraron por muerta.



4.
Do you think ghosts can ask for asylum in Cuba?
Willie, take my clothes off. Look at my scars
without crying and tell me I’m beautiful. Don’t lie,
don’t cry. I need to drink a cup of coffee with you
reading me Ginsberg, Simic, and Julia de Burgos.

Yours forever, The Ghost.



*the verses in italics are lines from Julia de Burgos’s poems

BobBradshaw
Posts: 2683
Joined: 03 Jun 2016, 21:03

Re: Postcards

#2 Post by BobBradshaw » 20 Mar 2017, 21:27

Some excellent stanzas. I love the second one:

2.
Write me a poem that will bring me back to life, papi.
Be my distraction, or I am going to find a tall, blue eyed angel
with baker hands and lips like James Dean.

SOriz211
Posts: 65
Joined: 02 Jan 2017, 01:02

Re: Postcards

#3 Post by SOriz211 » 22 Mar 2017, 20:34

Thank you Bob. You are so kind!

Sergio

Bernie01
Posts: 777
Joined: 30 Jul 2015, 11:14

Re: Postcards

#4 Post by Bernie01 » 02 Apr 2017, 00:47

Sergio---

love the death described here, just when we carelessly thought we understood love.

Poem of My Sleeping Pity

With closed eyes, wide of intimate voices,
I stop in the century of my sleeping pen.
I contemplate her in her dream ...
Sleep your sad night
Detached from the ground where my life starts.


....

No longer projects the sensitive edge of his fingers
Throwing me joy,
In the perfect harmony of my erect song.

....


My excitement awaited ....
But I had moments of suicidal madness.
A bustling wind of hope
It seems to me that your return is coming.


...

Between the moonfire that invades me
Moving away twilight I feel you.
You are here. With me.
For my dream.
My tears are falling asleep now
Where you crossed my verse!

Julia de Burgos





Julia de Burgos died at the early age of 39, but she left a body of work that made her into one of the most influential Puerto Rican and Latin American poets of the 20th century. At the 100th anniversary of her birthday, a long list of prominent poets and writers are keeping admiration for her work alive.


She started her career as a poet when she was very young, influenced by the writings of Luis Llorens Torres, Clara Lair, Rafael Alberti and Pablo Neruda, among others. During her life she published two collections of poems. Her third book was published posthumously in 1954.


After her last failed attempt at love, de Burgos lived alone in New York. Despite having many admirers and a vigorous professional life, she fell into a deep depression and alcoholism. On July 6, 1953, she collapsed on a sidewalk in El Barrio and died of pneumonia in a Harlem hospital a few hours later. Since she wasn’t carrying any ID when she died, de Burgos was buried as “Jane Doe” or NN at the public cemetery on Hart Island.

Upon noticing her absence, her friends began to look for her, and even El Diario/La Prensa published a notice. After several days of intense searching, her body was exhumed and sent to her hometown, Carolina, for a solemn burial.

That sorrowful ending secured the prophetic fame of her poetry. A few months before she died, de Burgos wrote her only poem in English, “Farewell from Welfare Island,” which reads:

It has to be from here,
right this instance,
my cry into the world.
My cry that is no more mine,
but hers and his forever,
the comrades of my silence,
the phantoms of my grave.



Julia de Burgos in New York

– In 1940 she moved to New York with the great love of her life, the Dominican exile Juan Isidro Jiménez Grullón. The following year, the couple moved to Havana. In 1942, after separating from her lover, de Burgos returned to New York, where she would work as a journalist, an employee in a chemistry lab, a lamp seller, an office clerk, and a seamstress, among other occupations.


– On July 6, 1953, she was found unconscious and without identification on the corner of 106th Street and Fifth Avenue. She was brought to Harlem Hospital and died that same day. Given the lack of identification, her body was buried in a public grave. Later on, her body was transferred to Puerto Rico and buried at the cemetery in Carolina, close to the Río Grande de Loíza [Loíza River], which inspired her famous poem from 1935. In 2006, the corner where she was found, was named Julia de Burgos Boulevard.




http://www.puertorico1924.com/julia_de_burgos_64.html




By Allen Ginsberg

For Carl Solomon

I

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,......

I’m with you in Rockland
where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse
I’m with you in Rockland
where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void
I’m with you in Rockland
where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha
I’m with you in Rockland
where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb
I’m with you in Rockland
where there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale
I’m with you in Rockland
where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won’t let us sleep
I’m with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls’ airplanes roaring over the roof they’ve come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny legions run outside O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we’re free
I’m with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night

San Francisco, 1955—1956



Simic---- Pulitzer, 1990

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/charles-simic



bernie

FranktheFrank
Posts: 1983
Joined: 02 Mar 2016, 18:07
Location: Between the mountains and the sea

Re: Postcards

#5 Post by FranktheFrank » 30 Apr 2017, 22:39

Very sad, I know of that lovesick despair that leans on death.

SOriz211
Posts: 65
Joined: 02 Jan 2017, 01:02

Re: Postcards

#6 Post by SOriz211 » 07 May 2017, 16:26

Thank you Bernie. You found a good translation, that makes me so happy. Thank you Frank, jpauchter, the poem was accepted for publication.


Sergio

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