29-09-2023

Blue 52

Nadia López García
In 1989, a team of oceanographers registered a
whale song that did not correspond to any known
species: it was singing at the most unusual frequency
of 52 Hertz, entirely beyond the range of
the vocal and auditive capacities of other species.

“Song of the Sea, a Cappella and Unanswered”,
The New York Times, 2004

I watch the upright galloping of white stallions,
they disappear in the foam of a sea that bellows
in rumbles of salt and water.
Always the same thundering voice,
always the same waves.

It is hard for me to imagine the edges of your song
in this sea, where ears do not suffice
to imagine the sonorous journey of your voice
resonating into nothingness.
Blue 52 —as you were called—
you are perhaps the only one who has known
the deepest solitude of all:
surrounded by seabirds
you wander without them marking your song,
they know nothing of you.

Such perhaps is solitude,
a voice that vibrates in a desert of echoes
without anyone marking its presence.
I ask myself what you have to say in that 52 Hertz voice
so similar to silence,
I think of the whale stories you might tell,
of the love that goes unsummoned by your call
and the horror of knowing that the seed of your voice
is barren.

I continue to observe the throng of waves,
suspended in that flickering, watery blue
searching for the exact word
to make my thoughts audible
on this sheet of sand.

Along the horizon, the afternoon overflows
resplendent and absorbed in its braided colors,
the water, unmoved by the song of a whale
condemned to sound like a cymbal holding back
amid a most speechless and impassive peace,
before a hand that writes and fails to find
that founders and falls silent.
Nadia López García, cultural agent and teacher, writes poetry in two languages (Tu’un savi and Spanish). She has participated in several recitals, workshops and festivals in Mexico, Belize, Colombia, Cuba, India, Guatemala, United States, Puerto Rico and Venezuela. She gained a scholarship on poetry from the Foundation for Mexican Literature. Her work, both poetry and children literature, both in Spanish and in Native Languages, has won different prizes. Se has published Ñu’ú Vixo / Tierra mojada (“Wet Soil”, Pluralia Ediciones, Mexico, 2018), Tikuxi Kaa / El Tren (“The Train”, Almadía, Mexico, 2019), Isu ichi / El camino del venado (“The Deer’s Way”, UNAM, Mexico, 2020), Las formas de la lluvia / বৃষ্টিধারার নানা রূপ (“The Forms of the Rain”, JOLDHI, Bangladesh, 2021), and Dorsal (FCE, Mexico, 2022). Her work has been translated into Arabic, English, Bengal, Hindi, and Catalan.

“Blue 52” was previously included in the “Unpublished” section of UNAM’s Períódico de Poesía No. 105 (Mexico, 2018).
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