Poetry and angels. The fabulous Mexican poet Homero Aridjis. It sounds inspiring, right? Well, it is, but the inspiration is uncertain, ambivalent, and mysterious. I know there is something there, something important and spiritual, but I’m not sure—it’s beyond my human understanding. Maybe that is the point of many of these poems.
Aridjis’s passion for the environment clearly comes through. He is a pioneering environmental activist who has led the fight to save the “habitat of monarch butterflies, Pacific gray whales, and sea turtles” in Mexico.
It is noon. In the perfect silence, the sound of a chainsaw is heard advancing toward us, shearing wings and felling trees. Man, with his thousand naked and hungry children, comes howling his needs and shoving fistfuls of butterflies into his mouth.
The angel says nothing.
or
The eight o’clock sun opens up a secret that slept perched on the trunks of the trees. and there is a breeze of wings, rivers of butterflies in the air. Visible through the bushes, the souls of the dead can be felt with the eye and hand.
The intelligence of the Earth is well beyond the mind
The earth thinks outside man’s head
The earth’s mind envelops like air, like light.
His angels remind me of the celestial beings in Wim Wenders’s amazing film Wings of Desire. They are present in our lives—in the invisible recesses of our loneliness, despair, and mundane bitterness. They are in our modest rooms and on our bustling streets. They are silent and seem to be inside us as well as outside.
It took me a while to appreciate these poems and the amazing illustrations by Francisco Toledo. When I first read them, I felt a little numb or confused. But weeks later, their power remained with me. I reread some of them, and now I can’t get the images out of my mind or the butterflies out of my stomach.
Learn more about the poet Homero Aridjis on Goodreads.
See a Time for Angels by Homero Aridjis on Audiobooks, Amazon/Audible, and Bookstores that are not Amazon.
You might enjoy Image of Jesus in Literature and Nonfiction on Noovella.
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