Insinuate and don’t expose

Poetry isn’t reasoned. As you don’t reason a perfume. As you don’t reason a melody. It is something provocative, suggesting. A poet’s mission isn’t to expose, it’s to insinuate. Poems are for our mind to recreate. And with only tasting them between lines, you can feel all of its charm.

You don’t think poetry, you feel it. It’s felt beyond, in the heart’s labyrinth which Pascal says “has reasons reason doesn’t know”. Poetry rises nude from waves of sentiment, without precious useless veils. And is so pure that it tends to give birth in loneliness.

“The one that doesn’t create decorates.” Nothing is as grateful as the poetry that has made a vow of poverty and strips of all vanity. Such is the poetry of José Toledo Ordóñez.

As the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, his verse isn’t more than a humble flute the Lord has blessed with infinite music.

Octavio Amortegui