BROWSE Columns
✕
In the middle of a night walk,
A bolt has retrieved the light of the streets;
And out there, in the abysmal strait,
The starry stream increases speed.
I feel the fear and I doubt
Whether this is not a warning coming down,
'Cause who shall handle the seas?
And the moon and the tides,
And the winds and the forests,
And reduce it all into a single poem?
Shall we be like the willow that reveres in silvering silence?
Or the crickets and toads with their innocent songs?
Perhaps the farmer’s the wisest:
He looks at the sky, yet not in bliss,~
To tell or not the coming of the rain,
And resumes his craft in the following day.
Ignacio Oliden (Buenos Aires, 1997) is a poet, translator and literary critic. He is Co-Editor in Chief of the literary magazine La Piccioletta Barca, and is a member of the editorial comittee of Buenos Aires Poetry (magazine and publishing house). He also participates as a regular critic in the Culture Supplement of the newspaper Perfil (Argentina). His work has appeared in print in newspapers, anthologies, and literary magazines in various countries, and his poetry has been translated into English, Italian and Greek. Among others, he has translated into Spanish the work of John M. Synge, Carl Sandburg, Anna de Noailles, and Marcantonio Flaminio, and he has published a book-length anthology of the poets of the Harlem Renaissance (Poetas del Renacimiento de Harlem, 2023, in collaboration with Juan Arabia). Mester de Juglaría, his first poetry compilation, will be published by Buenos Aires Poetry in 2023.
