This is a beautiful poem by another one of my favorite poets, Eugenio Montejo. I first heard the first verse in the film "21 Grams" (2003) and was drawn to reading the whole thing. Serendipitously, I discovered a treasured poet...
The first time I read the second stanza I was struck by its harsh contrast to the first and third stanzas, but upon reflecting, I believe it is the author's intention (and my interpretation) that, as time goes by, what is "suppose to happen" doesn't always happen as we expected. The ox cart heading to Nineveh arrives in Nebraska...was that a mistake? A misguided ox? Or merely an alternate destination to his journey that is more fulfilling than originally planned? I'm still trying to get my mind around the rooster...
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The Earth Turned to Bring us Closer
by: Eugenio Montejo
The earth turned to bring us closer
it turned on itself and within us
until it finally brought us together in this dream
as written in the Symposium.
Nights passed by, snowfalls and solstices
time passed in minutes and millennia.
An ox cart that was on its way to Nineveh
arrived in Nebraska.
A rooster was singing some distance from the world,
in one of the thousand pre-lives of our fathers.
The earth was spinning with its music
carrying us on board;
it didn't stop turning a single moment
as if so much love,
so much that is beautiful
was only an adagio written long ago
in the Symposium's score.
Photo Credits: This is a "sun dog" sunrise that I took on Oct 16, 2009. A sun dog is when there's a rainbow around the sun. With the sun still so low on the horizon, the sun dog was set off by itself enough to appear like a second sun. Capturing sun dogs are difficult. Capturing reflections of them in the water, even harder! :)
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1 comments:
i realize you posted this a while ago, but I wanted to comment about the rooster anyway. I believe its intended to compliment the Ox scenario in that where you are headed is not necessarily where you'll end up but that a rooster sings here and it sings there and its sang before we were here or there.
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