After a while

I wonder... after a while, does love remain love, or does it become a circumstance?

Mother Moon

Mother Moon
Sister Soul
Floating away, I think I'll change next to you

Taxi Chronicles - Mi calle favorita

- Esta es mi calle favorita.

Había pasado muchísimas veces por ahí, pero en realidad nunca le había prestado atención. Volteé un poco para ver qué tenía de especial.

- ¿Ah, sí? ¿Por qué?

- Está llena de jacarandas. Esos árboles, ¿se llaman jacarandas, no? Forman como una cuevita. En otoño se les caen las hojas, y les salen flores moradas, ¿son moradas, no?

Y sólo entonces las ví. Era cierto, estaban plantadas una detrás de otra, flanqueando ambos lados de la calle, y sí, formaban una cueva, como un techo de hojas que dejaba entrever el cielo, como una nueva calle áerea donde el azul transitaba.

- Sí cierto, qué bonito.

- Me gusta pasar mucho por aquí, además, cuando hace mucho sol, aquí no pega tanto.

Por estarlas viendo se me pasó la calle.

- ¡Ay, era la calle de atrás!

- ¿Quiere que nos regresemos?

- No, no, aquí está bien, bueno... mejor nada más déjeme una cuadra aquí a la izquierda.

No se me ocurrió que hubiera podido caminar una cuadra entre las jacarandas.


Jacarandas en calle Concepción Beistegui: Jorge Aguilar.

Amado mio

Algunas veces, el amor se confunde con la paulatina anulación del otro, con el fin último de satisfacer las necesidades propias.

Otras, con la comodidad. Aún otras, con el miedo.

Un'altra alchimia

Forse soltanto il barrocco sia riuscito ad accettare - e quindi  a capire veramente - la tristezza, per puoi  trovare il modo per farla diventare bellezza.

For my people everywhere: let a new earth arise

For my people everywhere singing their slave songs

     repeatedly: their dirges and their ditties and their blues

     and jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an

     unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an

     unseen power;

For my people lending their strength to the years, to the

    gone years and the now years and the maybe years,

    washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending

    hoeing plowing digging planting pruning patching

    dragging along never gaining never reaping never

    knowing and never understanding;

For my playmates in the clay and dust and sand of Alabama

    backyards playing baptizing and preaching and doctor

    and jail and soldier and school and mama and cooking

    and playhouse and concert and store and hair and

    Miss Choomby and company;

For the cramped bewildered years we went to school to learn

    to know the reasons why and the answers to and the

    people who and the places where and the days when, in

    memory of the bitter hours when we discovered we

    were black and poor and small and different and nobody

    cared and nobody wondered and nobody understood;

For the boys and girls who grew in spite of these things to

    be man and woman, to laugh and dance and sing and

    play and drink their wine and religion and success, to

    marry their playmates and bear children and then die

    of consumption and anemia and lynching;

For my people thronging 47th Street in Chicago and Lenox

    Avenue in New York and Rampart Street in New

    Orleans, lost disinherited dispossessed and happy

    people filling the cabarets and taverns and other

    people’s pockets and needing bread and shoes and milk and

    land and money and something—something all our own;

For my people walking blindly spreading joy, losing time

     being lazy, sleeping when hungry, shouting when

     burdened, drinking when hopeless, tied, and shackles

     and tangled among ourselves by the unseen creatures

     who tower over us omnisciently and laugh;

For my people blundering and groping and floundering in

     the dark of churches and schools and clubs

     and societies, associations and councils and committees and

     conventions, distressed and disturbed and deceived and

     devoured by money-hungry glory-craving leeches,

     preyed on by facile force of state and fad and novelty, by

     false prophet and holy believer;

For my people standing staring trying to fashion a better way

    from confusion, from hypocrisy and misunderstanding,

    trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people,

    all the faces, all the adams and eves and their countless generations;

Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a

    bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second

    generation full of courage issue forth; let a people

    loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of

    healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing

    in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs

    be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now

    rise and take control.

Margaret Walker, "For My People"