Tulips are the most expectant purity, as Love is harmful to the student.

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.