MILAGROS LÓPEZ | Mediterranean Poetry

MILAGROS LÓPEZ was born in Murcia. She is an English Philologist, a teacher and a writer. She has published a book of poetry, A ras del mar (Skimming over the Sea), Torremozas, 2014, which has received excellent reviews in literary magazines and has been translated into French by Prof. Ahmed Oubali. Her poems have also been translated into Dutch, Polish, Rumanian and English. The writer has also published poetry in several anthologies and has received first prizes for her short stories which have been published in anthologies. Milagros López has participated in poetry festivals like: Voces del Extremo Madrid 2013 and Moguer 2014, Women Scream International Festival Madrid 2015, etc. The writer is also a diver and has practiced this sport in the Caribbean Sea and especially in the Mediterranean waters.

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Poems below translated from the book Skimming over the Sea by Milagros López (A ras del mar, Ed. Torremozas, 2014).

You say…

You say I don’t know you.
Even in the distance,
I take your pulse every day,
I breathe you every instant.
I read you
in the ebb and flow of your tides.
I decipher you
in the hidden atlas of your longings.
I sail
at the mercy of your laughter,
of your fears,
of your yearning for me.
When you bring me closer,
when you avoid me,
when you adore me,
when you loathe the shadows
I spread out
on what you thought was
real life.

I know you.
I was always there.

Dwell in your memory

I want to dwell in your time,
be a constant thread in the gears
of your memories.
I want to be a part of the distant past
in which you forgot the beginning.
I want to be there when you look back,
behind everything,
beyond you.
I want to be the crystal in your routine,
an atom of your first yawn,
the tail end of your last thought.

I want to dwell in you
and let time go by…

15:55

Think about me.
Don’t forget the date.
When the three fives
merge every day,
when the spirit of laziness
invades all bodies
in the afternoon minutes,
our rivers melt together:
the embrace of my light which flows
to relieve the rain
in your leaden heart.

Think about me.
Remember our date.

When I become the squall
at five minutes to four,
return
the radiant hug
which will overwhelm me
with summer.

The rose bush

I’ll plant a rose bush.
I’ll plant a rose bush in your memory.
A unique rose bush in the withered rust at the bottom of your sea.
An exceptional rose bush from your hidden garden
surrounded by walls which do not define you.
My essence will remain
pinned upon its docile thorns,
its petals will distil me in the light,
bees will sip my name.
I will remain, as I have lived in other flowers
and I will inflame your garden with my presence.

Absence

Barely a scratch in time
your absence and I already drift.
Blinking from my chair
is a quest without a captain,
unbalance which shakes your shoulders,
an assault on the night watchman
with the eyes of the labyrinth
to rob his route from him;
the circle that dissolves
the hook when it yearns
to reach the vortex;
the key, at last,
which survived its keyhole
and finds no rest
till death.

How the Mediterranean Sea has influenced my poetry

The sea becomes the main character in my book Skimming over the Sea because it provides witness of the love experience and the pain of absence. But the sea also comes to life in my verses because it has always been a part of them: I spent my childhood and adolescence in summers by the Mar Menor, my best poems “grew” in the sunsets of this magic little sea. Now, I am also a diver and I submerge in the Mediterranean waters seeking answers of stillness that I cannot find on the surface.

When I dive, I understand the need that every person shares to experience their being as water, to return to that silence, as if it were the mother’s womb, bathing in the same water which is three parts of ourselves. It’s a beneficial return for everyone, a quick way for a poet to enter a state of calmness. The lack of gravity, the sensation of flying, the timelessness and the absence of noise are a combination of sensations which are impossible to find on the surface. These intense sea moments where I contemplated, swam and dived inexorably flow into my poetry.

My book Skimming over the Sea is a poetic narrative of the most authentic and intense love story that I have ever experienced. The poems follow a chronological order and are an answer to real stimuli. They were written at the time which they describe. Later, of course, when they were going to be published, many of them were thrown out and those which remained were revised many times. Despite all this, I think that the poems have preserved the freshness and the immense truth which inspired them.