La alborada / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

Daybreak

The stirring of the swallows impedes the serenity of the celestial morning. The seraphic birds observe their vow of jubilation and poverty. They suggest a nostalgic and pious emotion. They disappear suddenly, inspiring the suspicion they are attending the calling of a benevolent and elderly hermit.
     The ancient churches of the Episcopal city, inhabited by schoolchildren and doctors, occasionally make their bells coincide.
     The sick man registers the surroundings from a balcony, profoundly secluded in his hermetic house. Dressed in white, he remains in an armchair. His candid and withered face reveals the effects of an illness contracted since childhood.
     He has stayed up all night, feeling the sounds of a distant orchestra through the capricious air. The music insinuated the pastime of dancing in a radiant room.
     The sick man has discarded the faith of his elders. He endures the protracted idleness by following the thoughts of desolate and reprobate philosophers and by penetrating the secrets of the ancient languages, with their lapidary beauty. He recalls fatality’s threat, the inexorable laws of the universe in strophes of Latinate sonority.
     The sick man wraps his face with linen pulled up from his shoulders. He wants to hide the feeling of his latest composition from his affectionate maid and he speaks it in a low, soft voice.
     The poet mocks the privilege of the genius, diabolical mercy transformed into ashes. The skeleton of the symbol dominates in his song of solitude and bitterness and it announces, through a bronze trumpet, oblivion’s perennial sovereignty.




Las formas del fuego (1929)




{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }