Poem

A Season that Travels

But light is not only this,
for nothing is just something
anymore, my friends. But everything,
everything is this and light,
and everything.

And there is no way of saying it
but by contradicting and immersing
ourselves in the vertigo, and being
the swirl and the vertigo and the light.
Not only.

For if time is made of coming and going,
then, we, who are in time or above time,
will rest for a few moments,
and be contemplative,
simply beholding how the sun rises,
crosses and flees, and returns
in light everyday.

For we ourselves are truly the miracle –
with one another, we can create
the fountainhead of light
in our pupils and the gardens
of stillness in our hearts.

And there can be no light
without our eyes, old Plato,
nor would there be time, my friends,
but with this patient and heroic
and almost never-ending being alive.

So I come here to sing the day
and the day is this,
boundless.
Inauguration of sun.
Almost Sunday.
Adventure of audacious light.

Onward. Lets continue.
The day is also this, my friends.
A being in light everyday,
under the sky, or within.
A luminescent being in light
someone gave to us
for us to attain.

Behold how the day lugs its cart
of minutes. One after another.
Always. With no repose.
What we had, dispersed in the air.
Ah pain, ah love, what we had!
What descended to silence.
What went from vibrant green leaf
to the garland of oblivion.

And time goes on, my friends,
time continues.
And yet I cannot say it.
This is barely sensed.
Or savored like a sin

or the violet bouquet of old wine.


This day is also a season.

Let’s stay here.
With the day lets travel.

A season that travels, this is.

And we with it, until the hour,
a little gray, a lot somnolent,
the bell tower’s dark corner will sing,
when the sea of stars shivers.

We already know it. To be still. To sleep.
With no light. Tranquilly, my friends.
As in a night train that has lowered
the eyelids, a train with windows like
unyielding guillotines that behead in each
frame the landscape’s enduring reason.

Onward.
Onward.

To another season.
With another light.
The same and different.
To embark again,
on the sun and the air,
the contention and the secret
and the struggle.
Much as a scintillating wave
over another scintillating wave,
in this tide imperturbable and ours.

Ernesto Vasquez, MD