Classic Poem

Río Grande de Loíza! … Undulate into my spirit
And let my soul founder in your rivulets,
To seek the fountain that stole you as a child
And in mad haste returned you to the path.

Wind into my lips and let me drink you,
To feel you mine for a brief moment,
And hide you from the world in myself
And hear voices of fear in the mouth of the wind.

Come down for an instant from the spine of the earth,
And seek the intimate secret of my longing;
Confounded in the sweep of my bird fantasies,
Drop a water rose in my dreams.

Río Grande de Loíza! … My source, my river,
After the motherly petal raised me into the world
With you went down from the rough hills
To seek new furrows, my pale desires,
And all my childhood was like a poem in the river,
And a river was the poem of my first dreams.

Then came adolescence Life surprised me
Fastening to the broadest part of your eternal voyage;
And I was yours a thousand times, and in a beautiful romance,
You woke my soul and kissed my body.

Where did you carry the waters that bathed
My form, in a spike of the newly open sun?
Who knows in what remote Mediterranean land
Some faun on the beach will possess me!

Who knows in what rainstorms of what far lands
I will be pouring to open new furrows;
Or if, perhaps, tired of biting hearts
I will be frozen in crystals of ice!

Río Grande de Loíza! … Blue. Dark Red
Blue mirror, fallen blue fragment of sky;
Nude white flesh that turns you black
Every time night goes to bed with you;
Red band of blood, when under the rain
The hills vomit torrents of mud.

Man river, but man with river purity
Because when you give your blue kiss you give your blue soul.

My dear Mister River. Man river. The only man
Who has kissed my soul when he kissed my body.
Río Grande de Loíza! … Great river Great tear

The greatest of all our island tears,
But for the tears that flow out of me
Through the eyes of my soul for my enslaved people