Poems That Make Grown Men Cry Read Free Page A

protons and neutrons and
electrons will scatter and rejoin, that everything is connected, that when we drink a glass of water or shed a tear,some slight marrow of Shakespeare or Brecht or Rumi is submerged in the depths
of the liquid coupling of hydrogen and oxygen: the cosmos as a giant blender, making our every cell ultimately immortal. I am not religious and do not believe, as Quevedo did, that the soul will
subsist, that God will greet us once our body has finished its course of skin and bone and flesh. But this I do believe:my wife and I have sworn to mix our ashes, to be dust together for eternity.
Polvo seremos, mas polvo enamorado
. Angélica and I will be dust but dust in love. How can I not cry with joy for myself, for her, for all of us on this earth that will itself turn to
dust, ashes to ashes, yes, but ashes in love.
    JAVIER MARÍAS
    As we grow older, perhaps what saddens us most about the prospectof death – and, oddly enough, what strikes us as most melancholy and unbearable too – is not that we will cease to
live and have no more future, that is, no more knowledge, curiosity, or laughter, but the certainty that all our memories, our past, will disappear along with us, that everything we have
experienced, seen, heard, thought, and felt will no longer ‘float’ in the world – to use a deliberatelyimprecise verb.
    Maybe that is what is so moving about any attempt to rebel against this future disappearance. Not, I repeat, the disappearance of our own selves, but of all that we preserve within us and that
depends for its existence entirely upon our consciousness.
    Quevedo’s sonnet is one of the most successful of rebellions. It matters little that, as Borges pointed out, its extraordinarylast lines are perhaps ‘a re-creation, or an
exaltation’ of a line by Propertius (
Elegies
, Book I, 19). Quevedo’s last two lines – the lines that bring a lumpto the throat – are infinitely
superior. As are the first two lines, which throw down the challenge: even though death may close my eyes and sweep me off on the blank white day – ’
el blanco día
’,
that is, ‘
el día en blanco
’, a marvelousway of describing the day on which nothing will be written and on which nothing will happen – even though my veins and my
marrow and my whole body will be turned to ash, it will be ash that is still filled with meaning, and even though they will be dust, even though they will be nothing, they will be a nothing that
still loves. Yes, this poem is one of the most sublime rebellions in thehistory of literature. And we, the living, continue to read it, and that, at least, is something.
    Amor constante más allá de la muerte
    Cerrar podrá mis ojos la postrera
    Sombra que me llevare el blanco día,
    Y podrá desatar esta alma mía
    Hora a su afán ansioso lisonjera;
     
    Mas no, de esotra parte, en la ribera,
    Dejará la memoria,en donde ardía:
    Nadar sabe mi llama el agua fría,
    Y perder el respeto a ley severa.
     
    Alma a quien todo un dios prisión ha sido,
    Venas que humor a tanto fuego han dado,
    Médulas que han gloriosamente ardido:
     
    Su cuerpo dejará, no su cuidado;
    Serán ceniza, mas tendrá sentido;
    Polvo serán, mas polvo enamorado.
     
    ( PUBLISHED 1648)
    Love Constant Beyond Death
    Though my eyes be closed by the final
    Shadow that sweeps me off on the blank white day
    And thus my soul be rendered up
     
    By fawning time to hastening death;
    Yet memory will not abandon love
    On the shore where first it burned:
    My flame can swim through coldestwater
    And will not bend to laws severe.
     
    Soul that was prison to a god,
    Veins that fueled such fire,
    Marrow that gloriously burned –
     
    The body they will leave, though not its cares;
    Ash they will be, but filled with meaning;
    Dust they will be, but dust in love.
    TRANSLATION BY MARGARET JULL COSTA

    A Chilean-American citizen born in Argentina, the novelist and playwright Ariel Dorfman (b. 1942) has written many works in