If there is one recurring theme in universal poetry, it is the city. The city seen from the inside, but also from the outside, in the distance. We men live in cities that we sometimes miss, that we recognize as ours and that wherever we go, we take with us. Although it is believed that the poet is a solitary being, he is a social being who lives and suffers the degeneration that exists in the streets, but he also delights in the landscapes, in his people, in the taste and smell known of its avenues and its ruins.

Through time and the history of modern poetry, we will find that many writers have spoken of the city. The urban condition is present in Western poetry and narrative almost permanently. Cities, real or imaginary, such as Troy, Rome, Paris, Alexandria, but also Macondo, Arkham are there as proof and metaphor of the writers' ingenuity and one cannot conceive of the writing of Virgil, Baudelaire, Kavafis, without them.

Source

"Each person has a city that is the urbanized landscape of their feelings," suggests Luis García Montero. The same goes for the poet: the city becomes for him an accomplice, the urban landscape, with its life and its movement, is part of his being. In particular, I have some favorite poems about the city that I would like to share with you. These poems are not allegories to a particular city, but a reference to all the cities in the world, to the feelings they arouse in their citizens, feelings that can range from love to hatred or hopelessness. I hope you like this selection.

Source

Undoubtedly this selection should begin with the great Greek poet Konstantinos Kavafis, who has one of the most beautiful and real poems about the city. The poem is titled The City and I transcribe it completely:

You say: "I will go to another land, to another sea
and a better city I will surely find.
For every effort of mine is doomed here,
And my heart dies
as well as my thoughts in this desolate languor.

Where I turn my eyes I only see
the dark ruins of my life
and the many years I spent or destroyed here."
You will not find another land or another sea.
The city will go in you always. You will return
to the same streets. And in the same suburbs will come your old age;
In the same house you will gray.
For the city is always the same. Don't look for another one -there isn't one.
no roads, no boat for you.
The life you lost here
you've destroyed it all over the earth.

When we read this poem, we cannot stop thinking about what we live in each city. The city is each one of the feelings that we perceive, the people that we knew and that we were. No matter how much we try to flee from some cities, they will always go with us, because we are the city. The human being, like the snail, takes his house to every space where he goes; this is the case with the city that marks us, where we were born or made ourselves, that lives within us even though we are far from it. In this poem we observe how in the first stanza, the lyrical voice speaks of someone saying that he is seeking to flee from the destroyed city, a city without opportunities, dark and cruel. But in the second stanza, the lyrical voice affirms that the darkness and the ruins are in the one who looks, in the one who lives in the city and that no matter how far away, the landscape will always be the same because the desolation is not on the outside, but on the inside of it.

Source

Another of the great writers who has dedicated poems to the city is Mario Benedetti who wrote a beautiful poem entitled Cada ciudad puede ser otra (Each city can be another) . I share this poem with you:

Each city can be another
when love transfigures her
every city can be as many
as lovers run through it

love goes through the parks
almost without seeing them loving them
between the feast of the birds
and the homily of the pines

each city can be another
when love paints the walls
and the faces of the sunset
one is the face of love

and love comes and goes and comes back
and the city is the witness
of his embraces and twilights
of its bonanzas and downpours

And if love goes away and doesn't come back
the city carries its autumn
since he's only got the duel left.
and the statues of love.

This is one of those poems we read and can't stop sighing. Love makes people and cities. As in the previous poem, feelings make cities and spaces. When we have pleasant experiences, pleasant feelings, our whole environment is a portrait of what we feel. In this poem we see how cities can be so many feelings we have. One city can be many and each one will depend on what we carry inside. When we are in love, each place leads us to the memory of the other, to the lived experience, the shared hugs, the stolen kisses: a city of warm colours. But if love goes away, the city turns grey, cold, and winter arrives even though spring has not gone.

Source

I would like to close this small selection with a Venezuelan poet, one of the greatest in recent years, the writer Rafael Cadenas:

20

No one in this town listens to the wind,
nor the foliage that inclines to the earth
as trophies
nor the flesh of imperious shines
or trembling wells. This is your exile,
memory.

With this poem we remember the life that exists in some cities. Sometimes the asphalt, the walls, make life less liveable. The city is sometimes a cage, it is prison and hell. There are cities that are in the memory, but that we lost in reality, that no longer exist. Some people have said that the bigger the cities, the bigger our loneliness and misery.

Source

To read poems that tell us about cities is to travel to them, to observe their landscapes, to live with their people. To read poems that speak of cities is to find that there are as many cities as there are people, feelings. The streets, the human relations that are interwoven, their daily life, tell different stories at different times.None of us has escaped the sensation of long for a city, of wanting to return to that place and to that precise moment. Maybe in the end it's not the places, but the people with whom we share those places. The important thing is not where, but with whom. Because where we are happy, we will always live there, even if it is in memory.

---

I hope you enjoyed reading this post. I remind you that you can vote for @adsactly as a witness and join our server in discord. Until the next smile. ;)

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCE

https://ciudadseva.com/texto/la-ciudad/
https://www.poeticous.com/mario-benedetti/cada-ciudad-puede-ser-otra?locale=en
http://www.laguiadecaracas.net/22264/poemas-para-caracas/

Written by: @nancybriti

Click on the coin to join our Discord Chat

---

Vote @adsactly-witness for Steem witness!
Witness proposal is here:

Witness Proposal
Witness Proposal Update

Go To Steem Witness Page
In the bottom of the page type: adsactly-witness and press vote.

Use small letters and no "@" sign. Or, click here to vote directly!
Thank you!

---