As Javier Lostalé writes in the preface of this book, “delving into Manuel Neila’s poetry (…) means the possibility of looking at the world as if everything happened for the first time, means listening to the sound of the human and feeling ourselves part of that sound.”
At Zenda we reproduce five poems from The Flame and the Ash: Poetic Anthology (Olifante), by Manuel Neila.
***
THRESHOLD OF LIGHT
Early in the day returns with gifts
from distant skies,
and in green ferment proclaims its harmony.
Dreams of dawn, light: who breathes?
What haste of light among things.
I have seen it so many times
burn along the hawthorn hedges of childhood,
consumed in the furrows of love,
consumed in the eyes that look at it.
Promising as air or dreams,
clarity welcomes
the fables of time and memory.
Awakened consciousness: to whom to cling
but to the one who keeps vigil over us?
Now it arrives impatiently, calling
at the doors of day:
that hurried light that fills us,
consumes us… and disperses the ashes.
***
TRANSIT
At the edge of time
you pause. The breeze
dresses with old gold
the foliage of dawn.
Who breathes? The sun
presses the harp of the sky.
Unforeseen bloom
of light. Neither surprise
nor joy: naked
celebration of transit.
***
ABODES OF THE AIR
The house is empty, and day enters
flooding the room
with promises, with images.
And it enters barefoot, as then,
that human tremor, the uproar
that rises from the street
where living sharpens, calls us.
And it is light that I breathe:
clarity offered to those who gaze at it
with the persistent shine
of beings in their mere presence,
like a fire extending itself,
consuming everything,
by which everything exists and I survive.
To exist is to burn;
to live: to burn yourself: to give yourself to the light
that transforms and enriches all,
if you face it head-on, here, in the room
where, tree of fire,
your growth is flame;
its consumption, memory of life.
And it is light that I breathe
in these chambers where the air
does not contain forms.
And it is a source of prodigies, a persistence
of a truth that lasts,
burning away shadows,
engraved on the forehead with living fire.
***
MIDDAY OF SUMMER
The lights of summer take hold of the air, of bodies. Noon,
a reflection of green waters.
A blaze of embers and ashes.
Who watches over our gaze? What strange music
surrounds us in its waves? It is fear,
fear of losing life,
dread of wearing away in the effort,
in this irremediable decline, without pause, barely audible, of midsummer.
Now I close my eyes,
and the room from which I contemplate the death of light is lit. And those men who pass by:
who are those men beset by imposed deities? And if it is so:
how to forget their gestures, their ailments?
But the day knows nothing of pain.
A pure flow, it yields and suffices.
Washed by water,
by light, without violence,
today it comes to us with the destiny of a man.
And existing it will go, naked, intact;
like a body laid out before us, and in giving itself
it fulfills, completes, faints
under the purple silence of sleep.
How much splendor still remains, how much insistence
the world has to be light; time, smoke;
the one of the man in opening himself, generous,
to others who pass by, and to the fire that endures;
the one of love in giving itself like honey or venom,
eternal and forever green as the jungle.
There is no exit. For many paths have been traveled.
It is necessary to choose: accomplice or culprit.
***
LANDSCAPE
A breeze arrives
from afar, from very far away:
an ancient air,
still full of places
that perhaps were mine.
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Author: Manuel Neila. Title: The Flame and the Ash: Poetic Anthology. Publisher: Olifante. Sales: All Your Books.
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