The sea was lifted
By distant waves
Remembering the shores
From where they left
And the wind carried
Old promises
Mossy rocks were inviting
For bare feet to play
With other bare feet
In await for low tide
And the wind carried
Old voices
January 6, 2025
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2025
The first weekend of 2025, and I went back to my
routine of reading poetry. This time it was about introspection, without melancholy.
It seemed a natural moment to have with
change. With the unknown.
Poetry that fits such a state of soul knows no
culture, language, or inheritance. It is panhuman. So, I first read a sonnet by
Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, a representative of Spanish Romanticism circa 1890s, entitled
“Rima XI”. I have read this poem
before as it reminded me of the Armenian poet Mateos Zarifian, who, victim of
tuberculosis during the early 1900s, rejected all those who loved him. As such,
although he did not reciprocate, his poems are all about love, destiny, and longing.
Zarifian’s poetry influenced my teenage years, and
intermittently, my adult life. Interestingly, the compendium of his poems, a
book published in 1957, is still with me, tortured aver the decades of my
vagabondage around the globe.
So, I opened that book, put it next to Bécquer’s
sonnet, and read about unrequited love, in Spanish and in Armenian.
“Rima XI”
is about a woman rejecting on non-reciprocating Bécquer’s love. The last stanza
of the sonnet reads:
Yo soy un sueño, un imposible,
vano fantasma de niebla y luz;
soy incorpórea, soy intangible:
no puedo amarte.
—¡Oh ven, ven tú!
Translated as
I am a dream, an impossibility,
a fleeting phantom of mist and light;
I am incorporeal, intangible:
I cannot love you.
—Oh, come, come then!
In this case, it is only when the poet admits that
he cannot love her, that the woman agrees that he is the one for her. In Zarufian’s poems, it is he who rejects the
love of women in fear that his deteriorating health would be unfair to any relationship.
But his longing never stops or ends.
… And that was my first moment of introspection for
2025. Without melancholy. Without longing. Just a moment of inspection and
perhaps introspection. In an interesting way, I found myself not thinking in
Armenian, not reading in Spanish, and not writing in English. I was listening
to another language. One with no alphabet, and no sound. A language of “mist and light” as Bécquer described it.
And it was harmonious and soothing.
“Love takes
only from itself; love gives only from itself” as K. Gibran said. And I thought of it as a marvelous existence.
January 4, 2025
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2025
