Poetry

By

Alberto Quero

 

 

THRESHOLD AND PROCLAIMS

 

 

I

 

Smoke and silence are still equivalent:

the imminent sobbing and roar of this city

that never changes nor forgives,

the untranslatable frontier of delay,

of ambushes and madness.

But I have decided to give my battle

a flaring quietness,

the prodigious waiting for the things

that lay among the clouds.

My challenge has not ceased,

it just differs:

now I refrain from thick sleeplessness,

I lay aside this conclusive dispersion

of weariness and whispers.

To avoid inheriting so much wrath

and so many daggers,

I no longer try to catechize this tumult

of dust and noise;

to avoid inheriting so many futile fictions

of the hordes,

I no longer try to suppress unbearable labyrinths.

Flat and emancipated,

immaculate nomad,

I gather premonitions

and evade quotidian distances.

I carry this certitude of wind and guitars

to construct an excess:

a work of meekness and desire.

 

Slow and vast fate:

limit of fierce wounds,

collection of memories,

and I do not think I am lying to myself

 

 

 

II

 

I asked to be consecrated with sureness

so that it could be able to challenge the cliffs,

to be the crust of my widest wound

or a pause, constructed to survive.

And it seems I have been granted it:

I think a harmless fluctuation has defined me,

and an innocent declivity,

so I believe, so I seek.

I display new prophecies

And corroborate new fragments:

a ritual of hidden scrutiny.

Now I pull the searching and the clamor

and I am not tied to any forecast

Or, rather,

have I learned to rescue them

from the harsh delays?

 

 

 

III

 

Try to endure, I say to my own reflection:

I need to understand that I am adjacent to myself.

 

I try to be full of slowness

so that it may circumvent me and invoke prudence,

so that it may welcome pauses and artifices of hidden freedom.

I am still loyal to my impeccable habit

of vows and dissidence,

but now on a journey of renewed closeness

and a different docility.

I ask myself about the contour

that lays between naïveté and certitude

and I want to believe I have found it.

Now my voice wants to renovate a giant covenant,

to substitute a postponed and fragile siege

for a simple and spacious faith,

a faith of quest and burst,

a faith of grapes and wheat.

And that is the way my conviction does not go intact,

but this ample inspection

of remembrance and avidity subsists.

That is why I need to find

a permanent torch of shelter and garment.

 

 

 

IV

 

At this moment I am eager to swear before what is invisible

before the adjustment that may wait for me,

as a catapult of liturgy and resistance.

And I want to call it God,

confidence of peace and suspicions that widen.

And I want to call love or undamaged promise

this slow and sonorous tenacity,

to wait for it as an imperceptible shield,

as a freshness that will last

or as a new will to hide tiredness

and conjure diminutions and deteriorations.

And I want to invoke every abridgement

of dreams and pathways

and call decision of permanence and extension

or cancellation of fragments

this hunger for the things that ascend.

 

But I am still urged by

a determinant estrangement,

one that may hide ancient and foreign reminiscences,

a fire, a defense of permanence and caution.

 

Only then I will speak about

an indestructible redemption

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Alberto Quero

Poet and narrator. He holds a BA in Literature and Linguistics, a Masters in Venezuelan literature and a Doctorate in Humanities by the University of Zulia, Venezuela. He is a member of the Venezuelan Association of Semiotics, the Venezuelan College of Educators, the International Writers’ Parliament of Colombia and the Iberian American Writers’ Society. He is the Latin American collaborator for “Literary News” a radio show aired on CKCU 93.1, in Ottawa, Canada.

He has published six books of short stories and a collection of poems. He has written poems in English, which have been published in England and the USA. He has also published many peer-reviewed articles in university journals.