Welcome to my wings.

«On a million step journey,
the first step is the hardest one.»
Lao Tse

Today we begin to walk a path together, although it is an old one already. I've been leaving pieces of me, as footprints, castaway bottles or fallen leaves, since May the 11th of 2004. But I did it on my mother tongue, Spanish, the clay that my hands know better to try to express all the inner landscapes that dwell in my flying soul. The albatross is not a casual totem. There's too much of myself on that ending words of the poem of Charles Baudelaire: «ses ailes de géant l'empêchent de marcher». It whispers something about my nature, sometimes silly as a penguin on plain land, always on its own element flying there above, with my wings of albatross.

I would like to beg your generosity, because my English is just a tool to survive among foreign people, a simple door open to new friends, but I am a million light years away from the literary English, I mean I will hardly become able to translate not only my own Spanish original words, but also the most important: what I tried to say with. At this moment I'm writing this message of welcome in English, just as my head uses that language to think. So there is no translation here today. Because I wanted to come naked and honest to your door, waiting for your smile, hoping for a long way together from this precise moment.

Day by day I will try to, with a little help from my friends —feel free to help with your comments—, translate some of my previous works in Spanish, to share with you... not sure about the best, but at least the essential of my letters. The posts will appear more often on my original binnacle, Alas de albatros, of course, because translating takes its time, and I love to do things quietly, in order to be honest and bring the finest version for you all. Hurry is a bad company for almost everything, but special to literature, and I'm not interested on numbers and figures with my weblogs. I just want to meet special people and, most of all, to share what I do.

Finally, I thought it could be nice to finish today, this first day of a new journey —the same as always, but a brand new one if I focus on a wider horizon— with the single thing I ever wrote on English, I mean, no translating —I did no version of that poem in Spanish—. It was something I wrote two years ago, trying to catch the emotion of one moment, but you should remember, from here to the future, that I did the best I knew and maybe the rithym does not flow on these words, and also that I am not a poet —neither in Spanish, it's something to do with the inner voice—, because real poetry is something higher, deeper, and, above all, hard to reach. My familiar terrain is the novel, maybe the short stories, a little baroque, perhaps, nothing to do with so many writers I do admire as Carver, Cheever, Chéjov or Cortázar, to mention just a few.

Well, I'm afraid it took a while, too much, you will know me, I'm sometimes excessive, I talk too much sometimes, although I always try to say something useful, something true, that remains inside others as an echo... I hope you will let me know, step by step, on next months, if you stay on these wings. I would be really grateful for that. Have a great weekend, and here it is which we could agree to call the «poem»:

Madrid, July 28th 2005

To a mermaid.

A warm high tide has come
from the misty cliffs of time
to fload my castaway's soul
with her eternal embrace of sand.

Nomade clouds have risen and gone
from open shells of islands so green
and rained her pearls over my shore
carrying along the clay of my fears.

Sadness, that once fogged up my voice
has been swept away by her lips of ocean
and the mermaid has illuminated my hopes
with her smile, shy and fair,
as a reddy amber sunset.

And now, while I lodge in her eyes I feel
free in that shelter of dark honey
the foam of the waves is at our heels
and we share, hand in hand,
the joy of a new journey.