neil_donovan
Venezuela: The Harbinger of South America
by Carlos E. Mijares Poyer
Arrive brother, to know thyself in the mirror of your hometowns
Look up to the underground river from where The Angel Falls of      Venezuela
The highest waterfall in the world perils like a tear to tell its story.
The “Chiguires” are loving animals, known as the largest rodents
On the planet the size of baby pandas . . .
And I swim, past the deer swallower, a leviathan snake of fresh waters
That will tug a bull to the depths by its nose, and devour the message it      brought you:
The Jazzy and lyrical rythm of poetry in Spanish with its infinite love      songs
Or “Tonadas” of the plains which woo young girls into slow erotic      dances.
“Come to the Sun!” say the girls happily sane.
The harbinger, Venezuela, like nature and the universe does not need      us.
We need its message and the key to the lock that opens its great      southern mysteries.
And, there is no control of its political rallies.
I live here in the incognito glances of one that stares at me with one pair of eyes among the crowd . . .
And the petals of minute orchids flourish like fingers with the aromas of      our hands.
Here, and now I bring these fruits as numerous words like a black      rosary.
My Venezuela is Paradise Regain’d, the apple on my head is split in two
By the arrows of desire.
And, there is no control. The message this flying harbinger brings, comes as a rippled dabble of rainbow watercolors in the irises of the      sky.
PHOTOGRAPH: “Angel Falls” (Canaima, Venezuela) by Neil Donovan. Prints available at fineartamerica.com.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Prof. Carlos E. Mijares Poyer, born in 1966, is a Venezuelan-American author, journalist, poet, educator, translator, and marketer trained in the United States of America in schools and colleges in English and American literature and marketing at ISUM, the number-one ranked marketing college in Venezuela. He has participated in various literary workshops at Guilford College, North Carolina, U.S.A., where he studied, and in the Caribbean selected among 30 participants out of 10,000 writers to participate in the “Onelio Jorge Cardoso” writing workshop in Havana, Cuba, for his fiction. Editor of the Piper literature and arts magazine at Guilford College, where he published the poem “Overland: A Midwestern Postcard,” in the winter of 1987 praised by Pulitzer Prize winner Henry Taylor of American University in Washington, D.C., also, a literary journalist for the Ultimas Noticias Daily newspaper in its Cultural Supplement in Caracas, Venezuela, read and awarded internationally, publishing: philosophy, poetry, film essays, bio essays, feature articles, and short story. He is also a literary, commercial, and technical translator. A great admirer of the writings of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Hunter S. Thompson, William S. Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and British and American literature, Prof. Mijares Poyer is an alumni of Pine Crest School in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, U.S.A., where he was star football player and honorable-mention lacrosse all-American MVP (1984), later to play at Guilford College.