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Poetry

Four Poems

  • by Luis Hernández

Laurel Leaves

Laurel leaves
Crown
Both poets
And pasta

 

What’s that Flower

What’s that Flower
You have on
Could it be a faded rose
From days gone by

And it shall speak to you of me

And perhaps it will say

Shelley Alvarez was feeling sentimental. This strange state
only rarely overcame him. Perhaps what the waltz says is
true:

Affect is a law that governs and rules.

Because when Shelley was feeling sentimental he would
always wind up in that devastating feeling called memory.

What’s that flower
You have on
Could it be a faded rose
From days gone by
And affect disturbed him stylistically. One afternoon, moved
by these feelings, he left off a B-flat notation and recalled a
certain sorrow: but the Prelude gained something: that must
be how Frederic Chopin dreamt it in Palma de Mallorca:
What’s that flower you have on.

 

To a Suicide in a Swimming Pool

Die no more
Listen to a symphony for marching band
You will love yourself once more when you hear
Ten trombones
With their indigo clarity
In the night
Do not die
Weave into its indigo clarity
In the name of what God loves best
Emerge from the waters
Towel off
Look into the mirror
Where you were drowning
Stay on the third planet
Known only
For its gorgeous beings
Who emit sounds from their throats
That hinge between body
And dreams
And with the innocent devices
They raise to their lips
Or stroke with their hands
Purest art
Called Music
Die no more
With its indigo clarity

 

This is Luisito Hernández

This is Luisito Hernández
Former welterweight
Champion
And they asked him:
How many times
Must we forgive
And he replied
Seventy times
Seven. And because
I’ve been stabbed
In the back
I know where
I’m going. And my heart
Still chooses you
And soft
Grass growing
At the seashore
Where Time
Is easy and living
Is made of glass and
Her answered them
Seventy times
Seven. And over
The hills
Where time
Is as clear
And short as
The Season and
He replied
Seventy times
Seven. Over
The hierba there is
Wind and prairies
Held
By the silent hills
And he answered them
Seventy times
Seven

Translated by Anthony L. Geist

Read a review of two recent anthologies by Luis Hernández in LALT No. 5.

  • Luis Hernández

Luis Hernández (1941-1977) was a Peruvian poet, known as one of the members of the Peruvian “Generación del 60.” His verse collections include Orilla (1961), Charlie Melnick (1962), Las Constelaciones (1965), and Vox Horrísona (1970). Recent anthologies of his work include The School of Solitude (2015), translated by Anthony Geist, and Gran Jefe un Lado del Cielo (2017), edited by Luis Fernando Chueca.

  • Anthony L. Geist
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Anthony L. Geist is Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at the University of Washington (Seattle). Geist has taught previously at Princeton, the University of Texas (San Antonio), and Dartmouth. He has published widely on twentieth-century Spanish and Latin American poetry, and has translated the Spanish poets Jorge Guillén, Federico García Lorca, Álvaro Salvador, Luis García Montero and Luis Muñoz, as well as the Peruvian Edgar O’Hara. He is currently at work on an illustrated, trilingual edition of Rafael Alberti’s Roma, peligro para caminantes [Rome, danger for walkers]. More recently he has begun working in visual studies, including photoessays, art exhibits and documentary film. He considers himself fortunate that two of his great passions–poetry and the Spanish Civil War—are also his profession.

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