Heptagrama poetry contest 2012

Award of the Heptagrama poetry contest 2012

The jury of the 2012 Heptagrama poetry contest, after reviewing the quality of the artwork taking part of the contest, has allowed itself to give, in addition to the first prize, second and third prizes, and six honorary mentions.

Because of its rhythm, feeling, and beauty expressed in its verses, the jury of the Heptagrama poetry contest 2012 awards prizes to the following poems:

First place
Elogio de la Culpa (Praise to guilt)

Second place
Historia de Cruzados (Tale of crusaders)

Third place
De Brumas, de Broncas y de amores (On mist, rages, and loves within the cracks of time)

Honorary mentions

+ Pan y Circo (Bread and circuses)
+ Romance para una Siesta (Romance for a nap)
+ Lamentación del Prisionero (Prisoner's lament)
+ Bajo tu Chal (Under your shawl)
+ Identidad (Identity)
+ Mímesis (Mimicry)
+ Regazo del Azar (The backlog of chance)
+ Grandísimo (Great)

In addition, this jury wants to thank any and all the contestants for their dedication and abnegation to the art of poetry, which contributes to a better world, where Life, shall always occupy a place of honour.

Congratulations!
July 2012

Elisabet Cincotta, Blanca Barojiana, Ana I. Hernández Guimerá, Liliana Varela, Ana Lucía Montoya Rendón

Praise to guilt

Nobody shall come with the tender trade
of water. Nobody shall buy empty fish-tanks.
Listen: there are conniver sceneries,
there is a paternal heart which is not.
Listen: nothing will be neither eternal
nor mortal. Nobody shall sell
the schedules of guilt —the silly arsonists
die of love—. Nobody shall quit
the horn of peace. Nobody, to find shelter,
shall invent a rain from any winter.
Nobody shall sell his eternal talisman.
Nobody shall self-proclaim
Father and God. Nothing will be able to save
outside of me, no matter which is his hell.

Tale of crusaders

Poet, do not sing about war; do not pay red tribute to Moloch, do not be actual; be away from what's current, and distant as a god of other eras, like light from a star which arrives to mankind after centuries. —Amado Nervo

I cannot write about war
because I only keep memories
of false replays of a story
that my own optimism sometimes unearths.
Conceiving this page scares me as much
as thinking I could have fallen.
Wars do not outrun forgetfulness
and anyone can become a hero or a coward.
I was not called. It was late.
The last soldiers had already departed.

Euphoric and daring before the bullring
we were all blinded by the same farce
and we went, behind the accompaniment,
like in a carnival of blood and fear.
Only when Death shows a finger
gladiators stopped falling;
among those who spare lives and traitors
war became a paradigm.
Only when Death became a stigma
the chess game of elders ends off.

There is always a reason for war.
Briseis' abduction was a universal
hindrance, an allowance of endless
morbid fascination on the sinister file
of Ceasars and Brutuses. Being alive
is an execrable timing error.
War is not an incurable virus
but it infects all men:
some wanted the bloodshed to start,
others that the guilty one would not be punished.

Any life safeguards a verse.
Nobody's reason gets awaken by a verse.
So much graphomania confuses.
Any cause is worth so much effort.
It could change the universe
but it will not heal certain wounds.
Even when distrustful men and murderers
get full of shameless acrostics
the horror of agnostics will subsist
and the pleasure of suicides will grow.

Aggressors and allies: Neanderthals
who year after year go to crusades
with the infinite figures of their nothing
over their shoulders like theological gifts:
fanaticisms are also fatal,
like waiting in a lonely shore.
Would we need to turn the other cheek
and receive, with wicked jubilee,
the empty glimmer of Paradise,
the perfection which dies knelt down?

If at least you, dark Father, could
explain which illusionary authority
awakes in some men the mortuary
idea of sending to a polluted
supposed principle those
who harder wield the sword and bear conviction;
if you could at least listen to what is forbidden
in the name of the future martyr who pretends
to obey he who manipulates him,
you sure would prevent the conflict.

War was a comment for me,
and my father's fear for a document
I did not sign. War was an invention
so that the neighbourhood would not sleep.
Going over some rosary
did not exonerate anyone from crucifixion.
Someone cried and someone cursed
those who came back without medals,
and those who commanded the battles
from where the son never came back.

On mist, rages, and loves within the cracks of time

Within the cracks of time
where predators, preys and poets,
hidden, lurk
Today a distressing wind roars,
strange, scorching,
and carrier of tempests
From which ignored breasts,
from which millennial lungs
part of this sum of weak,
postponed, small voices
that, when colliding with the cracks of time
cause fear, trembling and tornadoes,
scare the predator away, alert the preys,
and inspire poets?
The wind is not new,
its age counts millenniums
same as the coward,
the brave,
and the traitor
but today, it drags tempests
from the quarries of Olduvai
and Laetoli
in the natal Africa
with its germinal prairies

The tempest drags the breath
of a painter in Altamira
the fears in Lucy and his partner
the silent scream of the kids in Tucuman,
Formosa and Bangladesh
the rebellion of all the outcasts
the cry of the rebels
and the sacrificed righteous ones
and the final breath
of invaded ones and invaders
who stepped on and step
the now separated
fields of Pangea
since the last cry
of the last Neanderthal

how much wind more,
how many tempests will there need to go by
through the cracks of time
—eternal and narrow—
until the tempests
turn into breezes
and heroes into poets?

Bread and circuses

I could have taken the mountain home,

suffocate memories under my armpit

and closed the doors.

I could dream without alarms,

crawl naked;

be cast away in rooms without light-bulbs.

A lot of glass kisses called me:

La Antigua, La Estrella,

the pulcata and the cigar;

there, imbeciles and insane awaited,

lonely intellectuals and moths.

The dinner with Dylan is cold now;

the crescent moon dimmed over his bed;

I could step on the safe port,

yet I opted to destroy routes again.

If I had wanted it,

the sun would have never got stuck

in the tubs of milk;

and I would have become a hummingbird,

drool taster,

and peregrine.

I could silence the orchestra and enjoyed the act;

I could forget,

and stop dying a little,

but I opted to go back

to the bread and circuses of your kisses.

Romance for a nap

Rosario, on her back
sleeps blocks before,
the nap tunes the silence
behind the window blinds
and in pavements drawn
with celestial geometry
the sun, counting tiles
sneaks through the slits
of sleepless halls,
the hidden galleries,
like looking for secrets
and captive women.
Yet outside, in the façade
of the uppish houses
the demons of the nap
protect their captives
with large plaster masks,
masonry witches,
or haggard gargoyles
and angels of fallen wings,
marinated in mold
because of the dust of the days,
even if the nap apparently
slows the escape of time.
The nap is a roundabout of gnomes
and furtive mermaids,
under it, the infancy lays
as an already-written letter
and the river shines faraway
like a lost illusion.

Prisoner's lament

I eu morrendo
nesta longa noite
de pedra.
(Celso Emilio Ferreiro)

In a pact with the stone and the dark
a pending which does not hang from anything,
I climb my walls. The stab
of the man enters me next to the wall.
How to ease my unsteady heartbeat
if death with mud splashes me?
By this hour, the night multiplies
its insolence on the stone, and it is the cloud
the one which rubs my eyes when it comes up
at night through the supplicating iron.

A rough wall silences the mirage
and my night in rags revolves
like a river, it weighs me down, it does not absolves me,
it leaves me alarmed and in paroxysm.
The platform exudes egoism
and fever silences the narrowness;
the hammers hit, obscure shadow,
the do not cut the lament...
It is the end. The firmament turns off
and the walls hammer my sanity.

Under your shawl

Under your lightweight shawl a cloud
an old hat
and a tram descend along your skin.

Under your lightweight shawl
the drizzle
and I keep a pencil without tip
and a deck of cards on your lap.

A clown without nose
a book full of pages
cuddle next to you
—just in November—
with the picture of mom's burial.

Under your lightweight shawl
we get water among the pebbles
and we travel through vast parts of this world
with a feeling of being always late.

When mounts drew
like paper shadows
I could not see you
just a branchlet of rosemary crossing your face.

Under your lightweight shawl
a prison of centuries
of delayed life
and the number of days we are left to live.

Identity

Puffing freedom to instil fear,
light up connivance nailing lonelinesses,
throw a yellow fear to what is started
to dye the trill of the shaking soul.
To sew a look, to stone jealousy,
to pour a stubborn lower illusion,
to resurrect stars, to polish auroras,
to mix a sighed angel with a warm demon,
to paint with desires a poisoned future
clench the teeth of desire.
To drink the light, dance the dark,
convert, roll, rub, suffer
the full joy of being myself.

Mimicry

Is this side
like your shadow?
A small piece of soul
sepoy as ornaments.

You will thrust in
your flesh weapon
The nightingale of the prophecy
sings
sinks
buries

with nails
plugs
memories in a time
which still is not.

The backlog of chance

A random Monday surrounds the nap,

Washing the dishes, a man meditates

Bitter misgivings simulate the party,

On water and soap, a flower withers.

Solemn, confusing, it breaks into his house

A captivated angel of irate jealousy,

Because of fear a cup slides to the floor

Imitate the pieces of the world map.

A table-cloth that rejects milled meals,

A boat awaits progresses from the sea.

A confusing killer of light green legends,

The clumsy greed which casts chance into mourning.

Great

You, who denied the crying

to mermaids.

You, who possess the body

and the senses of who possess you, believe.

You, the tireless who erases the footprint

of each travelled car.

You, who aggrandised yourself among Titans.

You, who keep in your cheek pouch of silences

all the thoughtful fish.

You, who have lost waves from the back

in fights against pirates.

You, oh great one

like a ship without sea.

Arts and expression + Poetry