Pretty Poem In Spanish

I came across a pretty poem in Spanish, by Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, so here is a very rough rendering into English, along with the original. 

Maybe the sun will be clouded forever. 

Maybe the sea will dry up in an instant. 

Maybe earth's axis will shatter 

Like brittle crystal. 

All this will happen! It may be that death 

Will cover me up with its funeral crepe 

But never extinguished in me will be 

The flame of your love. 

Amor eterno 

Podrá nublarse el sol eternamente; 

Podrá secarse en un instante el mar; 

Podrá romperse el eje de la tierra 

Como un débil cristal. 

¡Todo sucederá! Podrá la muerte 

Cubrirme con su fúnebre crespón; 

Pero jamás en mí podrá apagarse 

La llama de tu amor.

In Spain

In Spain, it’s never much of a search 

To find a mosque turned into a church. 

That bell tower, now so pleasantly ringing, 

Was once a minaret, hauntingly singing. 

The language itself is Latin at base, 

But with Arabic sprinkled all over the place. 

A massive civilizational clash, 

Leaving behind this cultural mash. 

Everywhere there is evidence 

Of this collision of continents.

250 Years

Two hundred and fifty years since they declared! 

I've been alive for more than a quarter of that, 

Observing closely who my people are. 

I have to say: don’t sell my people short. 

We are not always right, for awful things 

Have been done in our name, beneath our flag, 

But more than most we learn by our mistakes, 

Experimentalists, empiricists, 

We get it in our mind to just try something, 

And sometimes it’s a masterful success, 

But other times a grim catastrophe, 

At which point you will see us shrug our shoulders 

And then move on to try out something else. 

And that alone, that willingness to shrug, 

And just move on, has served the country well, 

This quarter of a thousand years, this stretch 

Of time since first we struggled to be free.

Chasing the Sun

In an airplane sometimes you seem to pursue the sun. 

You’re heading west as the setting sun does too, 

And the sunset hangs there refusing to be done, 

Impossibly long - a smear of orange on blue. 

Of course in fact the earth is spinning east. 

That’s the rotation against which your plane is racing, 

That’s why you see a glow that just won’t cease, 

That’s how you go on facing the star you’re chasing.

Not Under A Basket

I have tried 

Not to hide 

Such talents as I have. 

You may scrawl on my grave 

That at least I did not save 

My best for private consumption 

But had the galling gumption 

To toss it on the stage, 

By turns a fool or sage, 

In a rage or overjoyed, 

With the audience annoyed 

Or moved or just amused… 

But hopefully not too confused.

Sanctuary

I am an awful Catholic, it is true. 

I disbelieve. I do not go to church. 

Except, and this is strange, sometimes I do. 

I go into the building, on a search 

For something that I felt when just a boy, 

The sense, perhaps of solemn dedication, 

The sense of sorrow wrapped in promised joy, 

Maintained through centuries of aspiration. 

I bow my head, a gesture of submission, 

Not to what I believed in as a youth, 

Nor yet in token of some deep contrition, 

But rather in acceptance of a truth: 

That in this changing world, we give our best, 

Then hope it's good enough to pass the test.

Silent S

The s is silent in island,

Although I'm not sure why, 

Unless it's to trip up foreigners... 

Our spelling humor is dry. 

Our language is a collision, 

Cluttered with odd debris. 

Oops, another silent s... 

Just crept up on me.

Skala Eresou

To swim in the sea where Sappho might have swum, 

To spy the fishes nibbling in the sand, 

To listen on the whisper of the wind 

For words she might have spoken in a dream, 

Or sung in liquid tones while she would strum 

The strings of her tuned instrument, a stream 

Of feeling, both intensely personal 

And somehow, thereby, strangely universal. 

I know, from a fragment, she walked along this beach. 

The languid waves pulse on without a rest. 

The horizon hovers, always out of reach. 

A boundless longing lived within her breast. 

We have new gods from those that went before, 

But what has changed within our deep heart's core?

Unproven

 Theories? I got a million. Just ask my wife. 

At this point she’s listened to them for most of her life. 

Evidence? Yeah I do have some. But as for full proof,

It’s often just out of reach, somewhere up on the roof,

Like a squirrel that chatters and taunts me - hey, are you sure?

Unproven conjectures are teasers that I must endure!

Ultraviolet

 I understand that birds and bees

See ultraviolet frequencies. 

I cannot say the same for me -

I must make do with normal colors. 

The bees may say my vision’s duller,

But let them buzz about - just let them!

I’m still happy with our spectrum!

Vocab of the Bard

 One of the puzzles about Shakespeare, that playwright from the past,

Is that his vocabulary appears to have been truly vast,

Including technical terms from different arts and trades. 

How could so much learning be displayed

When he hadn’t really spent much time in school?

My guess is he studied while sitting on a stool

At local taverns - that his brain somehow stored

Material most people would have ignored. 



I Often Think

I often think 

About the Sphinx 

Which almost defies comprehension. 

 It’s a humanoid cat 

With an odd-looking hat 

Designed to attract attention. 

 How were they skilled 

 Enough to build 

A thing of such dimensions?

Cost

 Rich and powerful people, dragged through the dirt,

Hauled before judges, haughty but hurt,

Some of them seem like their souls are just lost.

The money sounds good... but what was the cost?

Cardinal

 I inquired of a cardinal,

What’s with the red?

Wouldn’t camouflage brown

Be safer instead?

He pondered it briefly 

And breezily said:

My breed’s really not

The cowering kind. 

We like to stand out,

Easy to find,

Ready to fight

If you’ve trouble in mind,

And let me just add

That the females I know

Are very selective 

In choosing a beaux,

But seem rather fond

Of a feathery show.

Sphinx

 You might think that by now the Sphinx

Would have sunk into the sand,

But it sits and never slinks,

Never scratches, never blinks,

Looking out across the land,

As some ancient sculptor planned.

Holding Holiness

They build churches

To hold holiness,

But then we worship

Things measureless,

And uncontainable. 

Still… sometimes attainable. 

The song of a bird at sunset,

As the evening star pokes through the blue,

It will not stay, and yet,

It plucks a string in you,

No words, all feel,

Just real. 

Rabbit Stew

 When we were kids, my father thought it was funny

To claim that he would catch the Easter Bunny,

And make a rabbit stew - a tasty way 

To celebrate a happy holiday. 

When Sunday came, he’d say the news was grim -

The bunny had again outsmarted him,

First stopping by our house with candy and eggs,

Then hopping over the trap with nimble legs!

A Sort of Skill

 Love is a feeling,

A force of the will,

Perhaps revealing 

A sort of skill

At truly discerning 

Beneath the skin

The fire burning 

The heart within.

Dostoyevsky

 Dostoyevsky was an addicted gambler,

Whose best characters are loquacious ramblers

Who frequently verge into the absurd. 

But since he was getting paid by the word

And was on a personal moral mission,

He brought great novels to fruition.

Consolatio

 Boethius called the Muses of Poetry names:

“Whorish stage girls”. In this way he defames

An art that he himself had long pursued 

In terms offensive and incredibly rude.

On the other hand, if we want to be perfectly fair,

He was being held in some kind of confinement where

He awaited a sentence of torture and brutal death. 

His book “Consolation” is sort of his final breath,

In which he tried to set his learned mind

On cosmic truths, hoping there to find 

Relief from anguish. And oddly enough this book

Is studded with poems. It’s certainly worth a look.

It bridges the ancient world and medieval times,

Profoundly affecting both Dante’s and Chaucer’s rhymes.