Maria O Tue Sep 18 2007 a 7:29 pm Very sad...and enriching
Senobia Pichardo from PAI read a poem by Pablo Neruda in Spanish and Gaines Lyons from Project return read it in English (version in English is below if you care to read it). What moved me the most were the testimonials of two young women who are Metropolitan residents. They spoke of the death of two friends that according to them they were murdered. Later on one of them sat in our table and told us her history of multiple hospitalizations, and she is only 21 years old!
I also had the opportunity to meet Rosy Tellez and talked about the projects (THEATER) we are working on and the possibility of collaborating on projects that address the mental health needs of the Spanish monolingual community.
Sonata and Destructions
By Pablo Neruda
After a great while, after unknown distances,
through confused states, uncertain territories,
accompanied by barren hopes,
and disloyal companies and unsettling dreams,
I love the tenacity that still survives in my eyes,
my heart beats to a rider's steps,
I grasp my dormant fire and fallen grace,
and at night, surrounded by darkness and inconstant sorrow,
I stand watch at the edge of camps,
an armed traveler of futile resistances,
hindered by growing specters and trembling flanks,
my arm of stone defends me.
In the science of grief there is a confused altar,
and in my sessions of lonely evenings,
in my abandoned rooms where the moon dwells,
with withered property and destructions that are dear to me,
I find comfort in my own lost being, my imperfect substance,
my tarnished silver and my eternal loss.
A burning thirst, and its lifeless water,
still wavers, still remains,
and the sterile inheritance, and the treacherous home.
Who consecrated the ruins?
z Who loved what was lost, who protected what was left?
A bone from a relic, wood from a lost ship,
one's own end, flight,
one's pitiful strength, a wretched god?
I spy, then, on all the emptiness and pain,
and the strange testimony that I bear,
with cruel efficiency and written in ashes,
is the form of oblivion that I prefer,
the name I call the earth, the value of my dreams,
the endless quantity that I measure,
with my winter eyes, during each day of this world.
