Brain Food #714
Stepping out of hibernation
Thoughts of the day
Happy Monday, and a warm welcome to everyone who joined Brain Food recently.
Starting this week, and the last day of January, with a poem by Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton that almost blossoms, coming out of hibernation.
Roque Dalton was also a revolutionary, a fact which gives the poem a different reading: through it, he faces the struggle of having opposition that, deep down, shares the same tragic qualities of being human, qualities which inevitably connect us all.
As we might be also preparing to step out of hibernation, it might be worth taking a deep breath before we do so, to realise that a fuller life does not always need much more than a bit of landscape and bread, and that the world’s beauty is for everyone. The world’s resources might be finite, but the opportunities it offers are not.
And, as Camus wrote, “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.”
In some ways, the revolutionary lies within all of us.
Like You
by Roque Dalton
Like you I
love love, life, the sweet smell
of things, the sky-blue
landscape of January days.
And my blood boils up
and I laugh through eyes
that have known the buds of tears.
I believe the world is beautiful
and that poetry, like bread, is for everyone.
And that my veins don’t end in me
but in the unanimous blood
of those who struggle for life,
love,
little things,
landscape and bread,
the poetry of everyone.
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