“If my love is thus, like a torrent,
like a river swollen in a full tempest,
like a lily starting roots in the wind,
like an intimate rain,
without clouds and without sea…
if my love is of water,
why do they try to tie it to immovable courses?”
Julia de Burgos
Julia de Burgos’s poetry is like a torrential rain falling on a desert. Her free spirit is a volcano that erupts in her verses, flooding us with the lava of her imagination.
Nature is present in most of her poems. It is the language of her soul. Her poetry is a wellspring of passion and intense emotions.
Reading her verses makes me cry, laugh, think, feel, fly. The themes deal with love, freedom, identity, solitude, and political concerns.
Neglected by the literary world during her lifetime, Julia de Burgos (1914-1953) was an accomplished poet
and journalist who was censored and persecuted due to her political ideas. I came across this poet for the first time when I read Edward Hirsch's anthology entitled "Poet's Choice". His essay on Julia de Burgos’s poetry
piqued my curiosity, so I got the compilation of her poems that Mr. Hirsch recommended.
I’m glad I did.
Jack Agueros did an excellent job of gathering all her poems in a bilingual edition entitled Song of the Simple Truth. Mr. Agueros also indulges us with a
fascinating chapter about her life.
Julia de
Burgos was a free thinker, and she expresses this in her poem “My Soul”.
“The madness of my soul
cannot repose,
it lives in the restlessness
in the disorder
in the imbalance
of things dynamic,
in the silence
of the free thinker, who lives alone,
in quiet exile.”
In the 1930's,
when Julia was still living in Puerto Rico, the economic situation was a
disaster. Unemployment was at an all time high of sixty percent according to
some sources, and Julia was affected by the
upheavals of this period.
Julia de Burgos went through a variety of
jobs which included working in a milk station offering free breakfasts to
children, and writing for a radio program called the School of the Air, where
it is reported that she was fired for her political beliefs. She also worked as
a school teacher in a rural area.
How can we
not be seduced by Jack Agueros' s poetical description of Julia de Burgos?
“Julia de Burgos was one of those persons who burst
into life like a comet sizzling through our solar system. We watch such persons
with a mixture of great awe and trepidation—we enjoy seeing the fiery aura and
tail, but worry about them crashing into us, or burying us in their smoking
wake.
“There is no doubt they are beautiful and brilliant—but
perhaps they would make us happier if they buzzed some farther planet. After
they are gone—burned out—or looped out in their elliptic trajectory heading
back to whence they came, our enthusiasm for them grows.”
Rio Grande de Loiza!... Elongate yourself in my
spirit
and let my soul lose itself in your rivulets,
finding the fountain that robbed you as a child
and in a crazed impulse returned you to the path.
Coil yourself upon my lips and let me drink you,
to feel you mine for a brief moment,
to hide you from the world and hide you in yourself,
to hear astonished voices in the mouth of the wind.
Dismount for a moment from the loin of the earth,
and search for the intimate secret in my desires;
confuse yourself in the flight of my bird fantasy,
and leave a rose of water in my dreams.
Rio Grande de Loiza!... My wellspring, my river
since the maternal petal lifted me to the world;
my pale desires came down in you from the craggy hills
to find new furrows;
and my childhood was all a poem in the river,
and a river in the poem of my first dreams.
my pale desires came down in you from the craggy hills
to find new furrows;
and my childhood was all a poem in the river,
and a river in the poem of my first dreams.
Juan Ramon Gimenez, the 1956 Nobel Literature Prize
winner, said: “Since I met her in Washington, I admired profoundly the writing
of this extraordinary woman for her endowment of creativity and expression.”
I will conclude this post with a fragment of one of her empowering poems:
I Am embodied in Now.
You have wanted to knock me down, load in the body of centuries
of prejudices, of hatreds, of passions, of jealousies.
You have wanted to knock me down with your heavy load
but I found myself, and your effort was in vain.
Go, line your centuries with the vulgar ignorant;
my ambitions are not yours, my flights are not yours.
I am embodied in now; about yesterday I know nothing.
In the alive, my life knows the I Am of the new.
