Towards an Encounter with Valentina Rojas

Photograph courtesy of the poet

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Valentina Rojas was born in Envigado, Antioquia, in 1998. She is a poet, editor, teacher, workshop facilitator, and cultural promoter whose work has appeared widely in journals, anthologies, and digital literary outlets across Colombia and beyond. Her poems have been translated into English, Italian, Arabic, and Portuguese, and have been reimagined through audiovisual, visual-art, and collage collaborations. She is the author of the bilingual collection La desnudez de la sombra / The Shadow’s Nakedness (2023) and Formas de la luz (2024). The poems translated here are drawn from a body of work on themes like to departure, tenderness, and the fragile shapes of memory.

Ulises Paniagua Olivares

Removals

You savour the blood
it is not a morning
for forgetting
nor for innocent omissions

The first house you abandoned
was inside your mouth

You no longer lose white stones
that are later replaced

Today the cut weeps
in your flesh and fragmented
shadow.

You raise your shadow
in the fugacity of departure

And you offer flowers,
striving to occupy
an unguarded pulse.

Prayer as the cure
for the human heart.

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A Cloud in the Hand

I would like during the storm
to take a great cloud in my hands
To place my fingers
Petals
Airy light.

In the humidity of a sigh,
to cut a piece
enough to bring it to the mouth
to feel how it dissolves,
how they lose form,
how they stop being weight.

Sorrows should be only a disguise
that clouds wear to look like
stone

In secret

They would have the consistency of carnival clouds,
enchanting symbols
on the tongue

You would take sadness
bringing it slowly to your lips,
it would melt into you
until no more than a trace of sugar,
a passing blackout,
a tiny lesson
that the wind will come back
to carry away later.

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The Kiss of a Dog

Beside the door
tenderness sleeps

The lit candle
unweaves the rose
the warp of ice.

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Window

Behind the glass
the robin dances
our gazes discern
the flight toward encounter

carries in its mouth
bread and tenderness

crosses the weariness

And this need for shelter
a fire stretched out
upon the table
It is the gift of being named.

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