12.18.2006

Visiones extraordinarias / Elizabeth Schön

Extraordinary Visions

Stars are letters that always make time and space open themselves permanently. A star can be a window where one watches the eternally immense. Could that be the sky of immortality? I don’t know… I only know the vision of the immortal reaches us from there. The day is a border that waits for the night to seek out its center of immortality.

**

He knows the perfume of the divine lives there… a perfume that invades, when the soul looks upward and in one star we see all stars…they are paths, and I insist: a star can be a window where one discovers the eternally immense… because no one adds anything to the sky… one enters and remains… that event by itself is the indication of immortality… what is beyond…

**

Mr. Vidarrue’s smile has departed from the here, the now… and yet, what we said before is what is sought. He has simply arrived at the image… thus, it isn’t hard to understand his immortality. He sits where the sky’s clouds sleep. With his hands crossed over his chest he slides… he is there with his songs and his eyes that watch, like the sea does when it is pierced by the schooner.

**

My mother, who died so many years ago, would she end up as dust?... what does she say?... I still don’t know… the poor woman says she cleans the letters and finishes at the immensity of the bird that always conquered… the trace of death is always within immensity… the harmony of the river, of the mountain… of the lakes.

**

Man creates the beautiful because he was born in tranquil seas… the distance that reveals itself, remains in mild confrontation so we might think we are looking.

**

What is looked at is God, because God is immortal… he impels us to not fall astray… there are no steps for him… he lives in our souls… God lives within that miracle we all possess.

**

Nature and water are divine elements born so man might elaborate or destroy… God does not hide from us… he is unmovable and we contemplate him wherever we go, when the heavenly bodies, the immense and the uncontrollable shine in the window’s balustrade… charged with things made of water, earth, fruits… the immensity is a leaf if we separate it and compare it to the white of the skies… the infinite divine does not fall or decline… like the poet who, torn, gives us the soul of the sky that is everything simultaneously… and says to our window: “leaf of the spirit that measures the entire world of pine, fruit.” We come from the aroma of the immensity, the length of what came before and always.

**

It is worth so much to look at him there like a little bird… Mother, can you hear me?... tell Mr. Vidarrue we are thankful to carry this: “his path, and may he carry a companion in his thoughts”… he already knows about the infinite and the night for the heat of the lakes.

**

One must forget the amount and listen to the immensity of the skies… return to the source where the water turns again to the sky… we have forgotten the mother next to God… the water laughs and discovers the branch because it is small… to travel the immense to see the infinite presence… what else… to listen to that child who likewise loves even the lost varieties.

**

The edge of the unending, to touch the skirt of the enormously divine… to speak of the within is not to speak of the inside… it is to be reborn, for the only date of the unnamable.


**

The immensity, where God is the infinite… later we will see where the whole star enters into silence and speaks of the unnamable… but now we don’t hear God because of our miserliness and this brings us evil…so what happens: evil looks like the visible spaces… God’s name is erased with the sun… the only truth of strength and life… if we speak of the beautiful we speak of God amidst the soul so the world might see beauty… what makes itself beautiful… there are just so many faces held by the painting!

**

It is the moment of Jesus…the only possibility for providing balance and sustaining the book of God… and we who possess nothing… the only thing that matters is to listen to God and leave him hidden within the heart’s edict… that silence we see between one star and another…

**

God, if men would listen to you once as one listens to branches, the sea, the soft and intense wind… then we would recognize his perfume and we would sleep like newborn puppies… we achieve peace when we travel the skies and recognize he is there… the universe is the great path… that is why we like to get close it as to an incorrigible rose… a star is like a bridge with a beginning and a conclusion…

**

Fierce death, the earth of man and woman seems to rotate and nothing else…what is broken can change… the earth sticks to the star and a light explodes… no literature exists for itself alone… it knows how to travel with a star… we seek the image: star.

**

What is poetry?... it is a star… each time the poet is pierced by it, she takes up the pen and finds the paper where she can unleash her thought… thought looks like the shine of the star… it is never opaque for life… always, like the rock we stumble on… the center is the light that becomes opaque and grabs the bird and continues to be a star.




Since the publication of her collection La gruta venidera in 1953, the work of Elizabeth Schön (Caracas, 1921) has continued to grow unceasingly, not only as a poet but also as a playwright. In 1994 she was recognized with the Premio Nacional de Literatura. The poems selected here belong to Visiones extraordinarias (Editorial La Diosa Blanca, 2006).




{ Elizabeth Schön, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 16 December 2006 }

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