CELIA: Poetry by Fernando Valverde

Fernando Valverde (Spain, 1980) has been voted the most relevant Spanish-language poet born since 1970 by nearly two hundred critics and researchers from more than one hundred international universities (Harvard, Oxford, Columbia, Princeton, Bologna, Salamanca, UNAM and the Sorbonne). His books have been published in different countries in Europe and America and translated into several languages. Valverde currently teaches Poetry and Romanticism at the University of Virginia College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

CELIA

                                                                                                                                                             Born today

You don’t know the rain or the trees,
but you are already a forest.

Today as the world begins for you,
while your eyes are filled with the sea,
while everyone welcomes you as in a station,
where one is always waiting,
while all is nascence and wonder,
maps that give no assurance as to a place to go.

Today as the world begins,
sadness unperceived,
you are pure time,
the fragrance of wood and silence,
questions without shadows
and the humble love of one who has lost everything.

I’m certain of this much,
the waves, the ocean,
your bird-like laughter.

You have brought forth the whisper of a memory,
your little feet, as little
is the trace of snow that you have left behind
in those January moments.

What will your life be like when it grows in your hands
with the fragility of good news,
like a fish that slips away to return to the river.

On any afternoon,
with the same surprise as a loved one,
you will feel the breeze that has touched the trees
with its ancient weariness.

There are times when it is rough and burns like a match
when it lights up a memory. . .

Your hands shine,
there are no shadows or knives,
I can see the comets
streaking through the night
like a boat that sets sail and enters into the fog.

Life is a house where a stranger lives,
a garden from the past you won’t return to,
a shore that you search for while fearing its ghosts.

But life is also
a light behind a window
when darkness
occupies every niche and every continent.

This night is dark,
the train searches for arms
that are on the other side of time.
Meanwhile, I think of a way to tell you
that dreams are part of us
like a pier is a voyage.

Because you are already a forest,
and there are dolphins and lakes and mountains,
and impossible loves
that will be called Celia.

Someone will say your name in the future
and an empty house will fill with people,
everyone will sit down at the table.

You have probably forgotten,
it was happiness that planted this sorrow,
it was happiness the same as a storm
above an empty glass.

When fear and despair show up at your door,
and all the cherries have fallen into the mud,
and seagulls cry out over
the intolerable abandonment of an injured woman
who feels that to advance is to be more alone . . .

If all this happens
remember the manner in which rain
turns into a tree
and the way that waves
are the water’s end and the sea’s beginning.

You don’t know the sea, or the mud or the trees,
but you are already a forest that a river runs through.

Source:

© Fernando Valverde. Reprint by permission of author.

https://www.fernandovalverde.com/en/poems/