This week was celebrating the World Day of Poetry, so I would like to pay tribute to her writing about some Venezuelan poets who are writing about the situation in my country: Venezuela.

Writing is not easy. And writing poetry is less easy. There is in the person who writes poetry a careful, slow and sensitive look There is also a way of ordering the world and the letters on a page, a way of saying, of apprehending, catching and writing. But above all, there is in the person who writes, the ancestral and human need to express themselves in spite of silence, of repression, of the limitation of words, of the different layers of skin that are sometimes a hindrance, since language is sometimes hindered, by contaminated gaze or inexpresivity.

But must there be or is there something exclusive in the poetic object? Is there a particularity, a quality in which poetry is written or made? Do you need something special to be the motive of a poem? Apparently not: you can talk about the night, the wind, the man, the woman, life and nothingness. You can also talk about a country. You can also write, poetize about the spoils, circumstances of a country and its citizens.

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Ana Teresa Torres (2012) says:

I can not imagine a great writer writing about things he does not care about. I can not imagine that someone builds a literary work without starting from that which moves its existence. I can not imagine how it is written while absent from the written. (208)

According to the previous words, it is doubtful that a writer does not talk about what seduces him, what touches him, what shakes him. You can't write about what doesn't bother you, it worries you. Besides, you write because you feel, you agree or disagree, you are related, you are committed. The other attitude is false, empty and hypocritical.

In recent years, I have observed that there are more writers who stop at the brilliance, the nobility, the pride of our country, but also stop to see the rubble, to talk about the decomposition, the absurdity in which it has been converted Venezuela. To paraphrase Leonardo Padrón: "the country has become a cultured and sensitive issue, in a daily pat on the shoulder."

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It is not my intention to affirm or argue that in previous decades the country has not been the motive or center of our literature, and the texts have been windows, mirrors, echoes of our reality. But these years are witnesses of a Venezuelan literature with more reference than ours, with more concern or attention to what we are and what we are becoming.

Specifically, Professor Pedro Luis Vargas Álvarez comments that "in different ways, politics, political polarization - to be fairer - has managed to occupy the Venezuelan cultural scene and the specific field of intellectual and literary creation." There is, then, one of the most recurrent motifs in our current literature: the daily events of a fragmented society that breaks down and that is written from one side to the other.

Also, and in this we have to be honest, in these days there are things that can not be said or heard, you can only write, just read. And there is the importance of the book and literature, the writer and his voice, to survive writing. Perhaps that is why Sergio Dahbar affirms: "the country is in a process of uncertainty and people are looking for books to understand what is happening".

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One of our most prestigious and outstanding poets is undoubtedly Yolanda Pantin, who has been able to write and take poetry to high expressive levels, questioners, critics. Pantin's voice rises as the most important female poetic voice of our contemporary literature, hence I thought it would be interesting to bring a poem from one of her latest poetry books and start this analysis with her.

The pelvic bone (2002) is a collection of poems with a clear reference to the sculpture of María Lionza, where the queen of El Sorte, mounted on a tapir, raises a pelvic bone to the sky as a symbol of the feminine and fecund. In this book you can glimpse the reality of the country at a time marked by bewilderment, anarchy, restlessness. Poem VI of this text says:

They've cut our thread.
Umbilical
You can hear the music
Spheres hurt

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The beginning of this poem is very representative: "The umbilical thread has been cut," he tells us, and we immediately associate it with the bond between a fetus and its mother. This cord is broken. And it is not an action done by the voice, by those affected, nor does it occur naturally, but it has been done by others. There is then a clear idea of the division, rupture, provoked and distance between mother and children, a filial separation:

Caravans,
Metropolitan patrols.
Believe, believe in something other than corruption.
You yourself are
From your helplessness: a cynic.
But you are in your country,
Didn't a wise man write
Following tradition
Of centuries, before dying
A sign that conjugates
Breathing with death,
Biting his head?

Then, the following four verses speak to us of the environment of caravans and patrols as opposing elements, facing each other, if you like. History is a snake that bites its tail, history repeats itself again and again, inevitably. But "you are in your country", we are told and it seems that this state is a guarantee, enough argument to believe that anything can happen:

Let's go to the center
Where a fence
Human awaits us, stones
To grind the hulls
There will be no bandajos
In this multitudinous act,
No bells.
We will ring the hatreds,
The country has already been cut off
Whose fear subsists.

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In the following verses we are told where we are going and we are told that it is the confrontation. It is worth returning to the verses that follow: "We will sound the hatred, / Already cut the country / Whose fright subsists. Hatred as the only sound that repeats itself, as a slogan, as a cry that comes out. The country is divided and terror, sorrow, hostility survives:

There is the sun
This looks like a perorate.
It's premonition.
There is the sun
Priva in the valley
A mountain in bloom.

At the end of the poem, I observe how the poetic voice shelters from a hope, rocking in spite of the silence with the repetition of "There is the sun" and that "Mountain in bloom" as a witness. It is a labyrinth, but it has a way out, which is not today, but tomorrow.

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As you may have noticed, in this poem by Yolanda Patin the lyrical voice speaks to us of the current situation in Venezuela, of its chaos, of the war between brothers, of the hatred sown by the government, but it also speaks of hope, of that hope that refuses to die.

Tomorrow, when all evil has passed, surely our children will open the books and find there the history that we live, the terror that we suffered, and that knowledge will make sure that they do not make our mistakes, nor will they be enveloped in oblivion. Because a people that has no memory is condemned to repeat history.

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