The Name Drawn From The Names Poem by Juan Ramón Jiménez

If I have created a world for you, in your place,
god, you had to come to it confident,
and you have come to it, to my refuge,
because my whole world was nothing but my hope.

I have been saving up my hope
in language, in a spoken name, a written name;
I had given a name to everything,
and you have taken the place
of all these names.

Now I can hold back my movement
inside the coal of my continual living and being,
as the flame reins itself back inside the red coal,
surrounded by air that is all blue fire;
now I am my own sea that has been suddenly stopped somewhere,
the sea I used to speak of, but not heavy,
stiffened into waves of an awareness filled with light,
and all of them moving upward, upward.

All the names that I gave
to the universe that I created again for you
are now all turning into one name, into one
god.

The god who, in the end, is always
the god created and recreated and recreated
through grace and never through force.
The God. The name drawn from the names.


Translated by Robert Bly