Breathe
By Melisa Arzate Amaro
How to make sense of a series of images if they are violently projected, one followed by hundreds more, indecipherable fragments, laments in stupefied faces, screams silenced by time, tiny and starving bodies with no trace of identity or time? How to understand that, adjacent to horror, with the same reality and forcefulness, dwell the unconditionality of love, the inevitability of desire and the absolute transparency of truth? All realities, contemporary and mutually inclusive, come together in the mystery of poetry, convulsed, surprising and hyperbolized, just as they coexist in a daily life that is almost impossible to understand. I try, with one hand, to name what I do not understand in order to apprehend it and provide it with a certain sense; with the other, I try to capture the beauty of acts and gestures, relics that show that love is not only still possible, but that it is, perhaps, what keeps humanity afloat in the face of the horror of maddening realities that, although distant, are there, alerting us to the persistence of human atrocity and the inevitability of an insignificant death.
I refuse to ignore the wars that, by wounding and mutilating some, massacre us all in spirit and conception of being in the world; neither do I want to look away from the disappeared who add to sow this territory of doubt and fear of even existing; much less can I or do I want to forget the thousands of femicides that stalk with as much normality as the lascivious looks on girls and women who deserve to live knowing they are safe and free. I witness, capture with words and recreate with images that horror to make the reader feel, to that other who has decided to open up to the wound, the thought and the possibility of shock. At the bottom of my poetry, what underlies is an aquiferous mantle populated by childhood memories, works of art that restore faith in the human mind, signs of admiration before the untamed nature and the scientific portent that shelters it: drives of life, fertility and love, another, most of the time, unknown. The words, one by one, are waves that roar at the collision with themselves and pay homage to the wonder of language: that so pure and absolutely human, mother and father, beginning and end, testimony of humanity throughout all times.
I write, then, as a strategy of critical and ideological thinking and, simultaneously, as a praise to beings, events, memories and things that arouse love, in any of its forms. The result, for the moment, can be seen in the books Titila Sangre (Ediciones Periféricas) and Entera Nueva (Elefanta), which aspire to seduce the other with a construction made of words, profuse in decorations, details and connections with all those who live in this time in order to, once captured by that sonority, move them towards a shared reflection. Then, perhaps, that other will join me and look at apparently distant territories, events that continue their effects in the present and open wounds that, although it may seem contradictory, allow us to palpitate and yearn to feel. There we will meet, there, on the bridge, shore and raft that poetry provides, to dive into the deepest part of ourselves.
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of the company. Opinion 51.
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