Our daily bread

The Hop House: Korean food; a pint of Guinness; a close friend, smart, loving and up for a challenge. Inspired by a fine anthology of Portuguese poems, we talk about translation, about poetry before and after the Carnation Revolution. And then of Spanish poetry before Franco’s death and of the great Basque-Spanish poet, Gabriel Celaya. Before we know it camaraderie and bravado push us to walk the tight-rope of bringing poetry alive in another language. And  blow-by-blow we try to revive the boxer so that he can bounce back onto the ring. This is the result:

Poetry is a weapon loaded with the future

When you no longer expect to be privately moved

But your heart beats on beyond consciousness.

Ferociously alive, blindly exalted

As if your pulse was beating against darkness.

 

When, about to fall, you look straight into the clear eyes of death.

You tell the truth: the wild, terrible, loving cruelties of truth.

You say these poems that open up the lungs of those who, suffocating,

Demand to be born, to be rhythm, to be the law of everything beyond themselves.

 

With the speed of instinct,

With the lightning of a miracle,

With palpable magic, in our hands

Reality turns into its twin.

 

Poetry for the poor, poetry that is as necessary

As our daily bread,

As the air we breathe thirteen times per minute

To be and, in our being, be a glorifying yes.

 

Because we live blow by blow, because they hardly

Let us utter our names,

Our songs cannot be pure ornament without sin.

We are getting to the heart of everything.

 

I curse poetry conceived as a cultural luxury

By the lukewarm

Who wash their hands, sit on the fence, do not commit.

I curse the poetry of those who do not take sides until they are stained.

 

I make mine all faults; I feel all suffering within me,

And I breathe in all songs.

I sing, and I sing and,

Singing beyond my private sorrows, I grow.

 

I would like to give you life, to provoke your actions,

And I measure carefully what I can do.

I feel I am an engineer of verse

And a workman who with others works the iron core of Spain.

 

Such is my poetry: instrumental poetry,

At one with the blind beating heart of oneness.

Such is my poetry: a weapon loaded with a growing future

That I am pointing at your chest.

 

It is not poetry conceived drop by drop:

It is not a beautiful product. It is not a perfect fruit.

It is like the air we all breathe,

Like the song that expands everything we carry inside.

 

Words that we all repeat

That we feel as ours until they fly: they are more than what we say.

They are what we need: nameless.

Screams in the sky and deeds on earth.

 

Gabriel Celaya