These days it has not stopped raining. Dark clouds, bullets, stones, despair are raining.
The downpour falls and it is as if we could once again hear Eduardo Galeano say: “Fleas dream of buying a dog and nobody dreams of getting out of poverty, that some magical day good luck suddenly rains, good luck pours lucky; but good luck doesn’t rain yesterday, or today, or tomorrow, or ever, not even in a drizzle, good luck falls from the sky, no matter how much no one calls it ”. Today we feel like nobodies again, those who “cost less than the bullet that kills them.”
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It is frustrating to see situations like those of the last week repeat themselves in history over and over again. The pain is always the same, even greater. Poets of other times have already said better than what could be said at this time. His poetry is the march of words, peaceful and heartbreaking. His verses could help us to look further and, hopefully, give us comfort in these days when it is scary to live because “life has never been so deadly for a man”, according to Gonzalo Arango. Like him, we ask ourselves the same question: “Is there no way that Colombia, instead of killing its children, makes them worth living?”
Colombia, that house of ours. Maybe just the cuirass; one such painted house. The walls are coming down, as María Mercedes Carranza saw it: “Everything is ruin in this house, / the embrace and the music are in ruin, / fate, every morning, laughter is ruin; / tears, silence, Dreams”. We are prisoners of our own home. Or is the home itself that we are chaining. Nicolás Guillén would sing: “Oh Colombia prisoner, / orchid placed in a glass, / trill by trill, step by step, / spring is coming!”.
Is there a single culprit? Or is each one guilty in his own way? Mario Benedetti points to a “poor man” and tells him what he deserves: “poor lost dictator / after the fears of his fifth pure-looking president / so violent and repeated”. Let us remember, like Diana Sánchez, that “a bullet / a stone / a stone / a word is not the same”.
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Even so we have the music of these verses. Hope remains, as Emily Dickinson would say: “Hope is that thing with feathers / that rests on the soul, / and sings melodies without words, / and does not stop at all, / and sounds sweeter in the gale” . There are so many more snippets worth noting. I wish we would make an endless poetic anthology, as if believing that life goes on, and finally find a leak in front of so much rain.
* @ julianadelaurel.
