Greetings, friends of @ADSactly. I return to share with you some own photographs made to capture one of my motives of interest: the stone of the walls. The photos are of the exterior walls of the Fortress of Santa María de la Cabeza, in Cumaná (Sucre State, Venezuela), built between 1669 and 1673. For more information go to the following link.

The walls, understood as those ancient constructions made of kneaded earth, stone, or blocks of compact matter, have been present in human history and culture since remote times, until they became part of its myths and foundational texts. In the biblical Old Testament, for example, the famous walls of Jericho that were knocked down with the sound of the trumpets of the seven priests and the Hebrew people led by their leader Joshua appear. They are also in Greek mythology, as in the city of Troy, surrounded by walls built by the gods, as collected in the Homeric songs. Or the famous walls of Babylon. All consubstantiated with the stories of uprising, defense or downfall of a city or a town.

In the walls is expressed, as in any ruin, the devastating passage of time, but, at the same time, its permanence in the memory of men.

In contemporary Spanish-speaking poetry, the wall has had various manifestations and meanings. We can present some of them, such as the fragment of "En Uxmal" by the Mexican poet Octavio Paz:

Snake carved on a wall
The wall to the sun breathes, vibrates, undulates,
piece of sky alive and tattooed:
man drinks sun, is water, is earth.

In it the poetic voice recreates the figure of the "feathered serpent" (Quetzalcóatl) engraved on the wall, which has the life of nature as a body, between the divine and the human.

Or in a more classical and lyrical tone, verses from the poem "Conjuro" by the Cuban poet Dulce María Loynaz:

a wall I seek, a wall of granite
where the sea of your infinity crashes...

Here the wall is a metaphorical defense of that metaphysical blow represented by infinity, perhaps inspired by the breakwater that borders the shores of Havana.

We also find its presence in the poetry of the suffering Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik, specifically in her poem "Madrugada", where the "I" declares its helplessness before the elements, before the inclemencies of life, and is compared with what disappears before the endurance:

Naked dreaming a solar night
I've lay down animal days.
The wind and the rain erased me
like a fire, like a poem
written on a wall.

And finally, a fragment of the prose poem "Dice Rubén", in which the Mexican poet Jaime Sabines, as in a quiet dialogue with the great creator of Hispanic American modernism, Rubén Darío, proposes a sense of eternity, again in the confrontation between the passing and the fixed:

It is necessary to be in front of a wall. And we must know that between our fists that strike and the place of the strike, there is eternity.

The walls that I gather in my photos are as real as the ruined fortress of which they form part, which I have been able to observe for several years, since it is located in front of the birthplace of the poet Ramos Sucre (Cumaná), where I have spent long years of my life. I will never be able to erase from my inner memory the golden light of the sunset over them.

As a result of these photos, I wrote this short haiku-style poem.

On the walls

oblivion sculpts
his quiet work

_{Author's Own Photo}

_{Author's Own Photo}

_{Author's Own Photo}

References

Paz, Octavio (1981). Poems (1935-1975) (2nd ed.). Spain: Edit. Seix barral.
Pizarnik, Alejandra (1992). Selected works. Colombia: Ediciones Holderlin.
https://www.poeticous.com/dulce-maria/conjuro?locale=es
https://ciudadseva.com/texto/dice-ruben/

Author: @josemalavem

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