Tulips are the purest expectation,
as Love is poison to the student\'s heart.
You are as lovely as the tulips in spring.
Oh beautiful woman, wherever you are,
I long to be beside you,
you are as lovely
as the tulips in spring, your lips
so red, red as roses,
and I long to kiss them, to taste their cherry sweetness.
That time I saw you in the Holy Week procession,
where fortune entered my life the moment I met you,
saw you for the first time — I feel the ache of nostalgia
for the brief time we shared,
but in that time I was pierced
by Cupid\'s dagger of love.
Where are you, I ask? Where is she,
the princess of the enchanted castle? For whom
I must fight, where the queen of my heart will dwell,
she who enchanted me with a single glance —
your friend introduced herself to me,
and she pursues me, but I cannot
walk beside a woman I do not love.
Love of my life, come back to me, I want to see you
again, I cannot lose you, I know
I am not good enough for you,
but this adventure we must live.
From the capital you came, and your ways,
your grace, made me fall in love with you.
You told me of your adventures, your experiences,
your finished studies, and we spoke a while, but
time grew short and you vanished
into the mist.
You smiled at me again and again, and each time
you did, I fell deeper in love with you — that perfect
smile that sent a torrent
of loving feeling through my whole body,
a love real and true,
an innocent love — that is what I felt
each time you smiled at me, my beautiful tulip.
I want you so much, I wish I knew where
you are, I wish to shower you with flowers and give you
all the wonders of the world, I wish to stand
at your side always, that you might be
my beloved wife, the one beside whom I\'ll grow old
and raise a family.
What fury, to know that fool is your boyfriend,
twice your age — you, so lovely,
and him, unfit for this world —
I will fight for your love even if it means
gathering my strength
to strike that wretch down; I will win you back and carry you
to glory, my beautiful tulip, my great
gift from the capital.
You told me you had a boyfriend, and a great anger
rose through my body, every part of me
burned, and sorrow flooded
my heart, but it did not defeat me —
I can still walk beside you, still build
a life together. I will fight for your love.
---
Feeling
Have you ever believed in love at first sight?
Or thought it merely fiction, a novel
written in the twentieth century by idle poets
who spent their days distorting their own reality?
Truly, I do not know — I only know
that sometimes I live in an altered reality,
and that I, too, am idle, but I believe
I have lived something like it, with a beautiful
woman; at a church gathering I saw her, and in that
first instant it seemed I had seen the love of my life,
and I imagined a future with that lady, the queen
of my heart. She only spoke to me, but I imagined
a whole life with her, because my body felt
the sensation of being with her, of sharing, of being
her other half. It is inexplicable,
but that feeling compelled me to write:
YOU ARE AS LOVELY AS THE TULIPS IN SPRING —
an inspiration born of that love which rises
at the very first glance between two souls
that feel their kinship.
---
Brown, the Color of Nostalgia
What does brown mean to the poet who mirrors
his failings, his feelings, his wounds in poems
where his union with inspiration and writing
creates works of literary art? Brown is a color
that yearns for times gone by; the student\'s uniform
stands for the age in which these things took place,
and joins them to the memory of moments
that happened in a time now past — what a fitting
image, what an inspiration for the making
of this book. Brown also
stands for endurance, and the photograph is part
of a visual experience meant to underscore the feeling
the poet wishes to convey. Brown, too,
and the old photographs, the hat and the glasses,
reflect those lived experiences of the past — those
joys, that anger, that sorrow, and all else that makes
the past join hands with a contemporary age,
to connect with those who live yearning
for that past of our ancestors, yet who must
live in the present to connect with their own reality.