A Word from the Publisher– In this great month of September .Miombo Publishing gives you a special Poet , International Poetry Festival organizer and a Writer of Note from Medellin , Columbia whose poetry is rich with wit and rhythm. Fernando Rendon is an accomplished poet . He is the first poet to be featured on our new page Time of the Poet which is a page that will always feature world renowned literary arts legendaries and poetry gurus with the objective to inspire , motivate and educate budding creative talents. send all feedback to miombopublishing@gmail.com or you follow ,like and comment on the featured pages.
Enjoy and get mesmerized by the verses of this revered poet.
There Exists No Poem
There exists no poem
There is no music that calls you
That reaches you
There is no melody that makes your spirit travel
There exists no poem
There is no music that nourishes you
That touches you
There were not enough songs for you
No archaic song embraced you
My beloved poor in love songs
No inheritance fell to you
The gods didn’t throw flower blazes at you
Didn’t make all the universe’s red gold descend on you
The gold of legendary music
All the inebriating sound of leaves in the wind
Making up the universe of beings that embrace you
In the warp and woof of all times
My songless beloved
***
Of Humans
Forest.
Enchanted.
Felled.
Forest, naïve.
Of humans.
Forest turned into a legion of chairs.
Of beds.
Forest of cupboards.
Of coffins.
Of mirrors.
Of mirrors that reflect the cut-down forest.
Forest of steel-tipped spears.
Forest of axes.
Forest of animals sacrificing animals.
Forest of the medieval Bosch,
from which the wood is taken in which the condemned will burn.
Forest of fighting heretics who burn in their cause.
Forest of love and resistance.
For repopulating the earth with trees, with water, with animals and humans.
Forest of fire, war of love against the forest’s enemies.
From the book Song of the Red Bough
We are youths barely two million years old
It’s very difficult to live without trying to possess a truth
and it’s the work of centuries,
But it is harder to reach the truth.
And what is truth?
Poetry is the subtle dialogue that puts an end to death and to war
for in the price of love’s oblivion, it is war and death.
Love is the poet of all planets
its rays give warmth to the sacred people
all the world’s love exists but has nowhere o live
we have closed ourselves against love although we are his,
its heart needs to be inhabited,
all the void exists to contain it, to hold it
and embracing love and its songs to be immortal
Where do you hide? Nothing ever ends
Only you know which is the hand that writes
And which is the hand that erases,
What it writes and what it erases
The unvanquished forest repopulates itself, firmly ensuring the arrival of dew. The mythical sunflower sees a rebel sun climbing up each morning from the subsoil of the universe, to bury the rough night. An insistent prodigy feeds an as-yet-unseen green to the intricate memory of wheat ears.
An unimaginable cycle closes in the sleepy root of this story: the repeated scene of terrible death, familiar to the victims of a stubborn war, will yield to the sudden burst of fraternity among countless strangers, barely sensed.
The empire is inhabited by its labored panting only. The curtain falls on the bloody puppet show. Beauty is at a crucial rendezvous and peers into the eyes of death. Only poetry stops its murderous hand – the peoples are exhausted with not knowing themselves free.
The spirit of the forebears trusts our accumulating generation. We are their imagined synthesis. They are among us, in the fields where people fight to be plantation slaves no longer, where awareness transcends itself, in the road where sweet girls feed those who fight behind the barricades.
And poetry is our pole star.
A poem is not a game of chance, where a cardsharp heart places its stakes on a senseless bet. Neither does the poem stake its existence at a greyhound race. Poetry is the spirit’s number, the vestige of a superhuman metamorphosis.
Centuries ago, love was chained to a sinister poem. In a realistic poem, the working classes still struggle, Indian peoples mobilize from the south.
Men and forests are cut down by the same electric saw, while the world’s youth vainly waits for the spring, which will sprout like red gold, from inside out.
The fire destined to unchain us hides in the imagination of struggling freedom, in the shining heart of the stone, in the sibylline plants and in the books which the Inquisition banned under penalty of imprisonment, in the songs and myths that nourished the infancy of the peoples who climb up from the substance of earth, settled in an incandescent cognition.
The poem solves the riddle. Which is the hasty river, the bright, always-changing truth it always denies us, expressed through an indescribable mutation, whose course can only be altered by sleep?
In poetry, in the critical writing of the poem, we all played bluntly this deadly history.
Fernando Rendón was born in Medellín, Antioquia (Colombia), in 1951. He has published Contrahistoria, Bajo otros soles, Canción en los Campos de Marte, Los motivos del salmón, La cuestión radiante, La Rama Roja and En flotación. Actually he is general coordinator of World Poetry Movement (WPM).
He is director of poetry magazine Prometeo (103 editions) and of The International Poetry Festival of Medellin (25 versions). The Foundation Right Livelihood Award has decided to grant the 2006 Alternative Nobel Prize to the International Poetry Festival of Medellín, “for showing how creativity, beauty, free expression and community can flourish amongst and overcome even deeply entrenched fear and violence”.
Fernando Rendón received the international poetry prize Poets Against War (USA); the Arabian Bahrahill Foundation Prize (Saudi Arabi), Rafael Alberti Poetry Prize (Cuba), Mihai Eminescu (Romania); Mkiva Humanitarian Award As The Foremost Cultural Icon, (South Africa) and a jade plate from International Poetry Festival of Lake Qinghai (China).
