Irina Henríquez is a poet and film producer from Colombia with a degree in humanities from the University of Cordoba in Montería, Colombia. She leads the Manuel Zapata Olivella literary workshop at the University of Montería, has produced numerous award-winning short films, and is the author of A Riesgo de Caer from Ediciones Corazon de Mango. Her poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies in Colombia, Ecuador, Argentina, Brazil, and Spain, and her work has been translated into English and Portuguese.
from the article:
Bird
It settles on the branch and the branch knows not if it is wind or bird’s leg that graces it.
It flies and the wind knows not if it is branch or wounded wing in flight.
It falls and there is neither branch nor wind to stop its painful encounter with the earth.
Afternoon’s Vertigo
I
And that sphere of fire, how is it that it reduces us to its eternal arriving and then hiding?
This condition of observers of an Everything, powerless to ascend to its millennial fire, conceives within me the virtue of a river bird, of the desire of all the flights of my flesh.
II
I extinguish myself. I light up again. It is the spell of the wind upon the long branches of the evening.
A bat adorns the nostalgia of the tropics soon after the tolling of the bells.
But it is not enough. I do not get lost in the music, in the voices, in the rivers of words. I do not forget the night…arriving now.
III
Now I close my eyes, I have my body and I turn into the fruit of waiting.