A PERMANENT PLACE
And what hasn't happened in all these years?
Who could judge or absolve us?
It's not even about being alive.
Our dead are how many?
As a country we've survived all
conquests.
It's about finding ourselves,
to be the fulfillment of a people who live
in a permanent place.Palo Armando Fernandez
CITIES
Cities, who will erase
my steps, my amazement?
Will you remember the day
when I had lunch in the hotel,
when I was in a theatre,
or a wanderer
following the night's
hurried steps?
Will you know that I walked, holding
my heart closely not to toss it
amidst the crowd,
rolling away, shouting "I love all,"
through bridges and lonely roads?
Will you realize when I meet,
greet and accompany you
on my last trip?
Is this sleepless anxiety only for me?
Cities, nobody knows
that you are huge tombsPalo Armando Fernandez
TO A YOUNG FREEDOM FIGHTER IN PRISON
You already know it:
suddenly
it's as if you'd awakened free.
Those walls don't isolate you,
they concentrate
all the world within you,
in your body which alone
without looking for itself, finds itself
resisting, living.
It's what matters.Rumors from the world arrive
(never so many)
and they break the silence
of your brave solitude.
Torture, mockery,
do not degrade or humiliate you:
they've left your body transparent
and today, you see
your inner self more clearly.You already know it,
you know what you don't want.
You don't want for yourself the freedom
of the commissioner, the district attorney, and the priest;
you don't want for yourself the freedom
of the bankers, the industrialists
and the landowners;
you don't want for yourself the freedom
that day by day brings you to the Parliament,
to the Army Generals, to the Academy, to the Stock Exchange;
you don't want that power, you don't envy that force.
You have no desire for adulation, for pampering, or obedience.While your name is paraded in the press:
hero, bandit, sane one, crazy one,
adventurer, apostle,and many other things
that you didn't want to be, that you aren't,
you really know
because of you and for you, what brought you to yourself
to those four walls
where you resist without fear now.That's what matters.
Palo Armando Fernandez