My Early Poetry
The following poems appear in my book Alma Mater I. They are the most valuable treasure of my young literary works, since -unlike my short stories- they recount real events. While some of my short stories are actually based on true events, they convey more fiction that true facts in fond and explicit content. Some poems needed to be edited or were enhanced since some of the pages in the poem as originally written were missing, I reconstructed them as I recalled them, to the best of my ability.
An important poem that was not included in Alma Mater I praise the sea while chanting a love stories. The poem is entitled LA MAR (The Sea), called so as a female, like many Gallegos do in Spain.
LA MAR
La mar me ama con sus besos
que vienen y
se van con la resaca
es intermitente
como el amor
de una mujer.
La Adoradora (The Adorer) was a poem written while attending law school and possibly while studying overnight with several classmates. Since I attended both the engineering and law school at the same time for at least two and a half years, this was a strategy to extend the exam preparation time. While I was a perfect A student in my first two engineering semesters, the concurrency of school work took a toll on my engineering GPA, especially on unrelated subjects, while I still remain a good law student, and outstanding in some subjects such as economics and philosophy and logic. Upon completing my engineering degree, I attempted to restart my legal studies in Bogotá, but had actually applied to start an MS in Statistics at Universidad de La Salle, when I learned that my US immigration visa had arrived.
Some other poems part of Alma Mater I were written in Bogotá, probably in El Salitre, a park that I used to visit with my girlfriends, but most likely I was alone when I wrote them. I called them Poemas Capitalinos (Poems from the Capital), and once sent them to Diario del Caribe, but I do not whether they were ever published. Some of these poems might have been written in La Castellana sector in Bogotá, just across from the theater by the same name, at the time when President Andrés Pastrana, used to be Mayor of Bogotá and had visited that place.
Those poems appear in the book under the sub-collection Versos Capitalinos (Verses from the Capital). Another important sub-collection is called Poemas de Perfección y Encanto (Poems of Perfection and Enchantment), most of which survived my immigration to the United States, and thus appear in my book.
Other collections narrate my experience in school and some romantic stories with a sense of reality and mystique. I condensed these poems with other poems written in English and French, and named them in Latin, Alma Mater I, hoping that there will be other subsequent collections.
As the 2011 Nobel Prize in literature was given to a poet, namely, Sweden's most notable living poet, Tomas Tranströmer, all poets who published a work during this year should also feel like true winners.
