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!