La Diosa lee/The Goddess reads

La Diosa lee,

el silencio,

escucha.

Rolando Gabrielli2026

The Goddess reads,

the silence,

listens.

Un día perfecto/A Perfect Day

Un día perfecto

¿La vida está en otra parte?,

pareciera una pregunta de ciencia ficción,

una ruta al más allá del planeta ausente,

mientras aquí y ahora, el plomo cae

sin gloria ni piedad, dolorosamente

mortal, inequívoca, rotundamente,

al ulular de sirenas con sus alarmas

dementes, propias del manicomio

que viene del espacio y por todas partes,

luces ciegas, luces de muerte

y la poesía no puede hacer milagros

 en un mundo cruel que patrocina

 en sus grandes cadenas el espanto.

¿Alguien debiera detener a la muerte?

La oscura mano del mal aprieta dientes

y gatilla fuego, barre lo que no logra ver

en la arena de la nada.

¿Es el peso de la eternidad,

el que vuela con alas jóvenes

y vuelve al amanecer?

Rolando Gabrielli2026

A Perfect Day

Is life somewhere else?

It sounds like a question of science fiction,

a route toward the beyond

of an absent planet,

while here and now

lead falls

without glory and without mercy,

painfully mortal,

unequivocal, absolute,

to the wailing of sirens

with their demented alarms,

as if from an asylum

arriving from space

and from every direction—

blind lights,

lights of death,

and poetry cannot work miracles

in a cruel world

that sponsors terror

through its great chains.

Should someone stop death?

The dark hand of evil

grits its teeth

and pulls the trigger of fire,

sweeping away what it cannot see

on the sand of nothingness.

Is it the weight of eternity

that flies on young wings

and returns at dawn?

Mi espejo/My mirror

Mi espejo

Mi blog

Mi hermano

Mis palabras

Mis sueños

Mi pasión

Mi fe

Mis días

simples

verlos correr

como si nada.

Rolando Gabrielli2026

My mirror

My blog

My brother

My words

My dreams

My passion

My faith

My days

simple—

to watch them run

as if nothing.

La poesía, un paréntesis al silencio de las palabras/Poetry, a parenthesis in the silence of words

 

https://letralia.com/ciudad-letralia/fechado-en-panama/2026/03/05/poesia-parentesis-silencio/

Poetry in a Mad Geography

By Rolando Gabrielli

Memory is the birthplace of the word. It travels, transforms itself, creates atmospheres, and bears witness to what it sees—what it selects, connects, and ultimately lives. Poetry breathes, and in that breath it founds something enduring.

From where I stand, Chileans have been extraordinarily fortunate. Few countries have known such a wealth of poets—voices we have been able to read, hear, and encounter—throughout the twentieth century and now into the first quarter of the twenty-first. A century that refuses to collapse even as chaos, stupidity, and the perverse digitalization of everyday life threaten to flatten human experience.

Not everything has been lost in our fragile paradise, the only one we have. Poetry is not merely part of the landscape; it changes the landscape of the arts themselves. A work either contains poetry or it does not. The distinction is absolute. Within the human spirit, the poem either takes root—or disappears.

Do not search for it, reader, in empty corners where words never arrive and nothing ever blossoms.

I remain drawn to the overlooked: the talented losers, the silent guests, those forgotten despite their merits, those postponed and only reluctantly accepted. I think of the disappeared—how terrible forgetfulness is. And of those who never stopped writing. And of those who, regardless of years, distances, or eras, I sense are still present.

Once again we find ourselves walking toward the abyss, ignoring the words that defend life.

Poetry, however, remains a light in the tunnel of history.

---

Beyond Words

A poem is more than words in their pure state. It carries the imprint of the person who writes it, the circumstances of its birth, the readers it seeks—or unexpectedly finds—and the strange durability that allows it to endure in time.

A poem survives when its language remains clear, fluid, and alive, when its message resists the distortions of fleeting interpretations or opportunistic readings.

As I write these lines, I am not consulting books or archives. Instead I turn to my own inner oracle, pressing memory and lived experience for what they still contain. Inevitably there will be arbitrariness, unconscious bias, personal taste. But poetry is not an exercise in taxonomy. We are not arranging specimens in a cabinet of curiosities.

Nor can we know everything or square the circle.

Poetry remains an enigma—even when it appears transparent, objective, or realistic, as though it were merely tracing the contours of human nature or landscape.

Every poet inhabits a different dimension: a particular depth, a particular historical moment, a particular resonance with readers. Ultimately, each possesses a singularity that cannot be replicated.

I remember an observation made years ago by the Chilean critic Jaime Concha during the era of the Quimantú publishing house. Concha compared poets to Chile’s geography.

And Chile is, indeed, a “mad geography,” as Benjamín Subercaseaux famously called it.

From childhood I have felt the force of that landscape. Santiago itself—dry, austere—lies beneath an enormous snow-capped mountain. A dark river crosses the city without ceremony, while the valley around it fills with restless lives resisting routine and imagining new futures.

“Santiago—capital of what?” the poet Gonzalo Rojas once asked.

He had every right to ask. Born in Chillán, widely read, widely traveled, Rojas belonged to that rare category of poets who resist classification altogether.

There are many such figures. Poets from the provinces—especially the south—though never provincial in spirit. Poets from the north, from the frontier where Chile begins after Peru and Bolivia. Urban poets from the capital. Wanderers, expatriates, exiles.

In the end, poetry is inseparable from reading.

For proof, one need only think of Borges.

---

The Baptism of a Country

Concha’s metaphor extended further. The poets of Chile, he suggested, resemble the features of the Andes themselves: towering summits, volcanoes, lakes, coves, rivers, even delicate threads of crystalline water.

Chilean poetry has always been tied to the land.

Gabriela Mistral. Pablo Neruda. Pablo de Rokha. Nicanor Parra. Efraín Barquero. Jorge Teillier. Juvencio Valle. Violeta Parra. Rolando Cárdenas. Alfonso Alcalde. Floridor Pérez. Raúl Zurita. And surely others I fail to mention.

In many of them there is a powerful telluric force—a poetry rooted in earth, weather, and distance.

Yet Chile’s poetic tradition stretches even further back. Its founding poet is the Spanish soldier Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga, author of La Araucana, the epic that first named the country in verse. In its opening lines he describes a land both distant and formidable, a place of proud and warlike people who had never bowed to a foreign king.

With that gesture, Chile entered literature.

The country that Ercilla measured—from north to south, in its astonishing length—became a geography not only of mountains and rivers, but of language.

Nicanor Parra, who delighted in paradox, once offered a warning that remains unforgettable:

Woe to those who read only one book.

---

A Seductive Diversity

Some readers may feel that looking backward risks nostalgia. Yet memory in poetry is not regression—it is a form of knowledge. It sharpens the present and helps us imagine the future.

What makes Chilean poetry so compelling is its extraordinary diversity. Before and after the political rupture of 1973—what many remember as a cultural blackout—the tradition persisted with surprising vitality.

The coup scattered artists across the world. A diaspora emerged whose significance has yet to be fully recognized in Chile’s cultural history. Yet through exile, displacement, and silence, the word survived.

The fracture extended beyond poetry. Cinema, painting, fiction, journalism, philosophy, theater, music—every branch of culture was splintered. What once seemed a unified artistic landscape broke into fragments dispersed across continents.

The rupture was total. Horizontal. Vertical.

The spine of a culture snapped.

Those who lived through those years remember a silence that seemed almost physical: a blackout in broad daylight. The longest night in Chile’s history.

---

Chance Encounters

Reading poets is always a conversation across time. In recent years, those conversations have sometimes continued in my dreams.

Not long ago I dreamed of Gonzalo Millán, one of the most original voices of his generation. In the dream he left me a note—warm, generous, though written in unfamiliar handwriting—speaking about life and love. He had overheard me mention a woman and suggested I visit him. A typewriter, he said, was waiting for me.

In another dream the poet Waldo Rojas appeared like a character from Proust, patiently immersed in the craft of language. I have also dreamed of Enrique Lihn, of Parra, of Teillier, even of Neruda—whom I never met. Rolando Cárdenas appeared once in the distant landscapes of Chiloé, and Antonio Skármeta, who was once my teacher.

Such dreams are consoling. They remind me that poets do not entirely disappear.

They remain present in the pages we return to, in the conversations we continue with them long after they are gone.

---

Epilogue

I count it among the privileges of my life to have known many of these writers in person—to share with them workshops, classrooms, conversations, and the early atmospheres of literary discovery.

Those years now feel irretrievable: an unforgettable Chile.

More than half a century has passed. We are distant now not only in time but also in experience. In a sense, we ourselves have become part of memory.

And yet poetry endures.

Sooner or later, it calls us back.

Silenciar una lengua/To silence a language

Silenciar una lengua/

es arrebatar el alma/

de un pueblo/

su  sagrada/

palabra.

Rolando Gabrielli2026

To silence a language

is to tear away the soul

of a people—

their sacred

word.

Oye/Hey

¿Has visto algo/

más impresentable/

que el mundo/actual?

Rolando Gabrielli2026

Have you ever seen 

anything more disgraceful 

than the world today?

Abréviame en el olvido/Shorten me into oblivion

Abréviame en el olvido,

en una sola palabra

y parto adonde sea,

sin retorno, al aire,

quizás suspendido

sobre un globo

aerostático, saludando,

despidiendo a mi propio

olvido.

Rolando Gabrielli2026

Shorten me into oblivion,

into a single word,

and I will depart wherever,

without return, into the air—

perhaps suspended

above a hot-air balloon, waving,

bidding farewell

to my own forgetting. 

Alguien no está allí/Someone is no longer there

Alguien no está allí, hermosa,

y ese es el tiempo, lo sucedido,

solo la memoria en la imaginación

de los días, lo que nunca muere,

permanece en el silencio de las horas.

¿Dónde está el que no está?

Siempre descubriremos al final

del camino lo nuevo, el misterio.

Rolando Gabrielli2026

Someone is not there, my beautiful one,

and that is time — what has happened —

only memory within the imagination

of days, what never dies,

lingers in the silence of the hours.

Where is the one who is not there?

At the end of the road

we will always discover what is new, the mystery.

¿La bestia es animal?/Is the beast truly an animal?/ Sin tener que ladrar/Without having to bark at the world

¿La bestia es animal

o animal es la bestia

que se cree animal?.

El lobo aúlla frente a la luna,

ruge el animal salvaje

y el hombre brama,

hay ira en el chillido,

el grito es malestar,

prepotencia, impotencia.

Una rabieta infantil

es malestar, frustración,

un síntoma de que

algo anda mal, no fluye,

está atascado, explota.

Cólera, ira, rabia, enojo, furia,

contamos los humanos

con un amplio repertorio musical

para expresarse ante cualquier

circunstancia de la vida,

sin tener que andar en cuatro patas

ladrando al mundo.

Rolando Gabrielli2026

Is the beast an animal

or is the animal the beast

that believes itself an animal?

The wolf howls before the moon,

the wild creature roars,

and man bellows.

There is anger in the shriek,

the cry is unrest,

arrogance, impotence.

A childish tantrum

is unease, frustration,

a symptom that

something is wrong, does not flow,

is stuck, explodes.

Anger, wrath, rage, resentment, fury—

we humans possess

a vast musical repertoire

to express ourselves before any

circumstance of life,

without having to walk on all fours

barking at the world.

No hablo de poesía/I don’t speak of poetry

Con mis hermanos/

no hablo de poesía/

Con mis compañeros de trabajo/

no hablo de poesía/

Con mis hijos /

no hablo de poesía/

Con mis colegas/

no hablo de poesía/

Con los conocidos/

no hablo de poesía/

Con los desconocidos/

no hablo de poesía.

 Mi amiga ve el mundo/

como debiéramos verlo todos/

con poesía, 

con el alma/

la que preside todos los sentidos.

Rolando Gabriellii2026

I do not speak of poetry with my brothers.

I do not speak of poetry with my coworkers.

I do not speak of poetry with my children.

I do not speak of poetry with my colleagues.

I do not speak of poetry with acquaintances.

I do not speak of poetry with strangers.

My friend sees the world

as we all should see it—

with poetry, with the soul

that presides over all the senses. 

Algo que el viento/Something the wind carries

Algo que el viento no improvisa,

la innegable presencia de tu partida,

el viaje y aquí  en el aire me quedo,

el espacio inmóvil que sigue tu curso,

infinito como el silencio que viene

llegando con tu ausencia que me niego

aceptar en cualquier tiempo, amor.

Rolando Gabrielli2026

Something the wind does not improvise,

the undeniable presence of your departure,

the journey—and here in the air I remain,

the motionless space that follows your course,

infinite as the silence that comes

arriving with your absence, which I refuse

to accept in any time, my love.

A mis horas muertas/In My Idle Hours

 A mis horas muertas

les dedico

mi presencia,

disfrutan

de una inesperada

compañía.

Rolando Gabrielli2026

In my idle hours,

I offer them

my presence;

they enjoy

an unexpected

company.

Pausa/Pause

 El día de hoy,

exigente, lunático, rutinario, solitario,

con salida casual al sol de la mañana,

vagas estrellas nocturnas,

nubes errantes sin lluvias.

No es un sueño,

el día corre por su cuenta,

en cuerpo y alma,

seguiremos respirando.

Pause

Today—

demanding, moody, habitual, alone—

steps out casually into the morning sun,

beneath wandering stars of night,

beneath drifting clouds that carry no rain.

It is not a dream.

The day runs on its own,

and in body and in soul,

we will go on breathing. 

¿El alma es el peldaño?/Is the Soul the Final Ascent?

 ¿El alma

 es el peldaño

superior

de una escalera

que el cielo

espera?

Rolando Gabrielli2026

Is the Soul the Final Ascent?

Is the soul

the hidden step—

the luminous rung

of an unseen ladder

ascending through shadow

toward the hush of heaven?

Is it the breath

between earth and eternity,

the trembling threshold

where dust becomes light?

Bajo la persistente nieve/Under the persistent snow

 

Bajo la persistente nieve que cae en Nueva York,

Nueva York filma su propia película de terror

y no se rinde al espanto de la tormenta,

su innegable belleza adicional que el tiempo le brinda

y convierte en novia del asombro,

 ciudad fantasma por un tiempo de tormenta.

No te niegues ante este nuevo espectáculo,

la nieve no podrá derretir los sueños,

ni congelar el futuro si no dejas de ser

Nueva York en cualquier estación.

Por algo eres mi favorita,

vieja nave invernal del porvenir.

Rolando Gabrielli2026

Under the persistent snow falling over New York,

New York films its own horror movie

and does not surrender to the terror of the storm,

its undeniable added beauty that time bestows

and turns into the bride of wonder,

a ghost city for a spell of storm.

Do not refuse this new spectacle;

the snow will not be able to melt dreams,

nor freeze the future if you never cease to be

New York in every season.

For good reason you are my favorite,

old winter vessel of the days to come.

puedes más poética

Beneath the tireless snow that falls on New York,

New York shoots its own tale of terror

and will not yield to the storm’s dread,

to that unmistakable beauty time lays upon her,

crowning her the bride of astonishment,

a ghostly city for the span of a tempest.

Do not turn away from this new spectacle;

the snow cannot dissolve our dreams,

nor ice the promise of tomorrow

if you remain yourself—

New York, in every season.

No wonder you are my chosen one,

ancient winter ship sailing toward the future.

N.Y./N.Y

 La nieve cae en silencio,

blanca, sola, monótona,

dibuja la ventana.

Adentro y afuera,

el paisaje no se renueva,

la nieve cae en silencio,

impertubablemente,

blanca, sola, monótona.

Rolando Gabrielli2026

The snow falls in silence,

white, alone, monotonous,

tracing the window.

Inside and outside,

the landscape does not renew itself,

the snow falls in silence,

imperturbably,

white, alone, monotonous.

La vida es un hilo/ Life is a thread

 

La vida es un hilo,

que pronto se corta

para siempre,

sin hacer ruido,

ni volver anundar.

Rolando Gabrielli2026

Life is a thread,

that is soon cut

forever,

without making a sound,

never to flood again.

La infancia me recibe/Childhood welcomes me

 La infancia me recibe

con los brazos abiertos.

Dónde andabas,

me pregunta

y me abraza,

como si fuera

el primer día de clases.

Rolando Gabrielli2026

Childhood welcomes me

with open arms.

“Where have you been?”

it asks,

and embraces me

as if it were

the first day of school.

Escurridiza en su inasible vuelo/Elusive in her untouchable flight

Escurridiza en su inasible vuelo,

aire y mar la esperan,

mueve sus alas en paz,

símbolo de la esperanza

 que  representa y nadie lo niega.

Su frágil presencia, su legítima espera,

impaciente como cuando la primavera llega.

Rolando Gabrielli2026

Elusive in her untouchable flight,

air and sea await her,

she moves her wings in peace,

a symbol of hope

she represents — and none can deny it.

Her fragile presence, her rightful waiting,

impatient, as when spring arrives.