FLOATING Poem by Fernando Rendón

I


When we set out on the grueling march from the Apocalypse of the Shadow of Man,
among the yells of the warriors, under a panic sky that mortally wounded all of our
hopes, all our desires.

When we renounced ourselves to load our hope on the back of the brother, fleeing to the
margins of delirium where you can no longer see the cities of hell.

When we knew that the doors of Spring would open and would not open only to us, that
we would miss without fail the Shadow of Man, which we had loved since the
beginning, when there was no death in the flowery prairies and the quagmires had not
yet emerged from the human mind.

To return then, again, to undo in the heart the knot of our sweet wounded country, the
nothingness of our lost dream of a life shared floating.


II


The gay shadows of the macaws, sheltered in the shadows of the treetops, chatter about
the hullabaloo of the shadows of the apes. The shadow of the frond dances on the
shadow of a jaguar. A violent sun is the only refuge of the salamander. Shadows of slow
clouds on shadows crouching down, shadows that haunt other shadows that are afraid.
The shadow of a man eludes the shadow of another man.

The sea of shadows of the man arriving swoops on the shadow of the man that was. The
always sleepless, the astonished one howls. It is night upon the brook of light, that flows
into the pupil of the Shadow of Man, sticking the shadow to the light.


III


What good is it for a man, his shadow on the desert? The shadow of a tree weighs more
than the shadow of a man. In the desert, the shadow of the sunstruck knows that
paradise is a true shadow.


IV

"The stones shall cry."


Stone, talisman that chose its princes, bone of the presence and the beginning, I
recognize your sacred spirit.

Our ancestors dug in the stone of the enchantments, went into the stone house of the
spells, where the invisible life speaks.

A prehistoric clock of light, the shadow turns round the stone, which listens to the
heartbeats of man.

The lyre of Anphion raised the floating stones of Thebes. Voices that surged from the
stone go about the labyrinth of the ear.

Descended from the stone of the sun and drowned in shadows, the man no longer listens
to the stone that sings.


V


Lapidaries reveal secret transformations of the solids, new emanations from the urge of
dawn, from the heart of the stone that the lightning inhabited one day, before a shoreless
water emerged under the floating light, forging the interweaving of flowers and animals
to make a mother country of the wood.