This is what the founder of the Silva Poetry House discovered, on the day that celebrating the hundred year anniversary of an important poet, she ordered a sculpture to be made, in the form of a labyrinth of mirrors.
Armando Orozco Tovar
The sculpture was placed in the courtyard of the House of Poetry “José Asunción Silva” (the Silva Poetry House), itself located in the centre of Bogotá (Colombia) , and broken during the week of celebrations by a visiting child from college, who slipped, falling head first into one of the panels. These were destroyed, one after another in a domino effect.
The sections were shattered on the stone paving stones making an unfamiliar crash at eleven in the morning, the time at which she entered her office with a steady step to ‘oversee the verses’ of national poetry.
From that moment of the glass disaster, the creator of the Casa Silva (the poet Maria Mercedes Carranza, who committed suicide in 2003) began to suffer from a decline, which she experienced through the disappearance of loved ones and close friends. Her brother and best friends. And a mad poet knocked over beside the waves.
Colombia on the map became for her, a stain of blood and disillusionment, and she filled her poetry with scepticism and showed it to others.
Nothing seemed good or acceptable, to her, seeing the body of her country full of flies.
This was when she wrote her book of poetry “El country of the flies”. Epitaikú, a mixture of epitaphs and haiku, a genre that she created without realising, with little public recognition, except for the note that was written for the magazine Lecturas Dominicales.
The house was filled with light by her presence: she arranged, and spoke with tenderness or anger about the things in this world, because she didn’t believe in the other. She organised competitions, national prizes, lunches for board meetings, meetings with the boldest national and foreign artists, who competed with one another, like a lyrical merry-go-round, with no winner. The shadow of the poet Silva always remains in the mirror, one day disappeared before the terrified eyes of the visitors and vigilant.
The beggars, who passed in front of the house marked by the number 13, loved her.
One of those entered weekly, when he knew that she was in her poetry cell shouting: “Maríamercedes, I am here!”
They called him the scientist, and he was a resident of Cartucho Street. So, she arranged to take care of him in the Treasury, next to the stone fountain in the back courtyard, full of money thrown into the water by chance.
Time falls on the failing house, the same as on its creator: Fear, solitude, disillusion, scepticism, and monthly wear caused by the maltreatment by the local administration of culture, that should take responsibility periodically with donations to the foundation. In the house cultural events were and continue to be carried out, and the call “Let war rest in peace” was her will and final battle cry. This which closed the gate of the house which had been a tenement house and became a poetic dwelling thirty years ago, on May the 24th. That house where he lived with his family for ten years , the poet that no-one heard, who shot himself in the heart.
(Translated by duncan rooth – Email: duncan@surfacelanguages.com) – Photos: Pixabay
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