Jorge Contreras Herrera: When I think of you

When I think of you, a bubble of hummingbirds erupts in my breathing feathered galaxy of iridescence and smile. All of you is Babel and any language, living or dead, speaks of your eyes and of that dragonfly’s intensity: fervid gaze on the crescent moon chalice. You are volatile, and I do not question your mastery to walk over the water. It is you who sprinkles magic on the wings of angels, to fly and return to the heights of infinite heavens. You nourish me with magic and due to you I am generous.

Your skin is daintier than the breath of a prayer and your grace, marvel dragon of incendiary heart. When you walk, the stones stand up and surrender to the dust coming out of your steps. And if I were to talk about your tenderness, I assume the risk of spilling myself in sighs and get vanished; but I can say that you sense and feel the marrow of each word and it thrills your soul, that from within you a clarity emerges that bristles every hair of your body and your eyes get deified as two mandalas in which Shiva and Agni officiate ceremonies and it is like this that rites bloom lucidly.

And your lips: molten mineral reddened in the crucible of a thousand-year-old prophecy, that’s when the earth trembles its poems, and it’s nothing other than the passage hummingbirds open in the day, to shiver for you all night.

You are mysterious, almost unnamable, for your name is pronounced with a clean heart, for when you are named, splendid flowers will invariably emerge loaded with dreams.

A girl of thousand eternities you are, and you know how to render the sun and the moon at your feet, not to play, but to care for them. You are my temple, my east and west, my north and south, my zenith and nadir. And all the Babel’s languages, living and dead Babel’s languages, are not enough to express everything that happens, when I think of you.

Jorge Contreras Herrera

Mexican writer (1978). Poet, essayist, editor, reading promoter and cultural manager. Director of The Ablucionistas A.C. Health and Happiness through Art and Culture. Director of the Ignacio Rodríguez Galván International Poetry Festival and José María Heredia International Poetry Festival. Compiler of the anthology “Tribute to Sabines: here we are all together” and the Jose María Heredia International Poetry Anthology (2017). Author of the poetry books Inventario de caricias, ¿Quién soy otro sino tú?, Poemas del candor, Otro que fui and El espejo adecuado (Inventory of Caresses, Whom am I But You, Candor Poems, Other that I was and The Adequate Mirror). He has collaborated with literary magazines such as Circle of Poetry (Mexico), The Inverted Root (Colombia), Free Electron (Morocco), Taqafat (Jordan) and The Journal of the University of Mexico. His poems have been translated into Arabic, Italian, Portuguese and English. He has been a juror at the José Carlos Becerra State Poetry Prize of Tabasco, the Josué Mirlo National Poetry Prize and the National Literature Prize convened by the Institute of Social Security and Services of State Workers (ISSTE) in 2016. He was awarded the “Professor Rafael Cravioto Muñoz” University Recognition for the Reading Advancement Program at the XXIX edition of the University Book Fair, of the Autonomous University of the State of Hidalgo (UAEH), Mexico.