TornarOde to Miró by Blai Bonet (1957)
The vigour of the verdant, burying earth,
The glade of barley and aerial oats,
The path a man follows with his feet and heart,
Drift behind you. You feel them.
Then you say no more.
With eyes welled up and moist
Like two lachrymatories,
You appraise your great human innocence,
Making you cry, Miró of mortal joy,
Like a man observing a coin from his childhood.
Swift and stoic, you buy mature life
With the meditative price of
your ten years. Working:
Colour and brush grieve you because
The lad you are painting
Feels your aged hand on his head.
With the enclosed will not to look at the earth,
Man or his shadow, which is the lion, you lower
Your crystalline and accepting head to the pure
Wave that is a worm, your name or a mask.
Like Zurbaran’s profound canvases, your
Living paintings sing of those things that close:
The glass, the plate, the jug, the cowl and the monk,
The mark, the sign, order, a childhood of prayer.
Hence you do not speak, and through
Your eyes the paintings are silent,
Like a clear empty street in which the afternoon lads
Have left their toys and the enormous drawings
That with immaculate chalk they
have traced on the houses.
Joan Miró, silence fi lled with butterfl ies,
Children’s play area, crystal, painted bicycle
And the fresh blast for the Thursday boys,
Private beach, choppy sea, boat,
your eyes never used until being preserved
Inside your heart, moist as the angel of tears.
Live, rest, don’t look: you would
See the sourness of the earth
That turns men into a stormy race.
Burdened by prisons like a man who looks,
I come to your work as to clear sand,
Where the dust of the sea disembarks, serene,
Like a brave journey that turns into a beach.
Because in you it is a stoic peace of the Iberian lands,
this hard land of rabbits and apathy.
In you the entire fury of the planet is serene,
Just like clay becoming pottery.
Published in Mirós Barcelós . Barcelona, 2010. Mayoral p. 11
