<center>And in the beginning, the sky (photos and poetry)</center>

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<center>https://i.imgur.com/Qs7Zopq.jpg?1</center><center>_{Landscape in the Araya Peninsula (Sucre, Venezuela) Author's photo}</center>

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Congratulations on this new year, dear friends of @ADSactly. Perhaps heaven is the permanent or frequent "meeting place" of our body and soul. Particularly, in times like these we have just passed (Christmas and New Year's Eve), and in the new time cycle we are starting (a new decade), it takes on greater significance.

**Heaven opens up to us and opens us up to this new year.**

I spoke of "heaven", but perhaps it is more appropriate to speak of **heaven**, since diversity constitutes it: it is varied and different, not only throughout the day, but also during the temporal periods (seasons, where they exist) and geographies. But, even more so, heaven, sea ("the upper and lower waters", in some sacred texts) and land are indivisible, and so I would like it to be perceived.

I live in Venezuela, a heterogeneous country in itself. From my time in several of its areas, I have taken some photographs (modest, unpretentious), which I share with you at this time.

But first, as I usually do in this blog, I'm pleased to give you poetic fragments of several writers in which the sky is a reason for creation and reflection.

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<center>https://i.imgur.com/niGkHCX.jpg?1</center><center>_{Landscape of Táchira State (Venezuela) Author's photo}</center>

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**Emily Dickinson (USA, 1830 - 1886)**

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>What an excellent sky
when the Earth can't have
How hospitable, then, the face
from our old neighbor, God.

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**Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926)**

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>(…)
you slowly pick up a black tree
putting him in front of the sky: slim, alone.
And you have made the world. And it's big, and it's like
a word that even in silence matures.

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Two immense poets of the soul -Dickinson and Rilke- communicate their diaphanous image of heaven in a sacred feeling, of earthly spirituality.

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<center>https://i.imgur.com/hbtDCGT.jpg?1</center><center>_{Landscape in of the Ávila (Caracas, Venezuela) Author's photo}</center>

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**Vicente Huidobro (Chile, 1893 - 1948)**

>(…)
if the night were to sing in the bird
in the forgotten bird in the sky
the sky lost in the night
I would tell you what's in the heart
that's buzzing in the bird
the night lost in the sky
the lost sky in the bird
the bird lost in the oblivion of the bird
the night lost in the night
the sky lost in the sky
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**Pablo Neruda (Chile, 1904 - 1973)**

>(…)
the earth is a black fruit that the sky bites.
And through the vastness of the void they go blind
the evening clouds, like lost boats
to hide broken stars in their cellars.

Between the playful and the serious, two founding poets of Spanish-American poetry - Huidobro and Neruda - sing to the sky in an imagination that recreates it in its variability and correspondence with the rest of life, on the one hand, and in its inexorable presence, on the other.

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<center>https://i.imgur.com/g9Uv2kS.jpg?1</center><center>_{Landscape in the Araya Peninsula (Sucre, Venezuela) Author's photo}</center>

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**José Lezama Lima (Cuba, 1910 - 1976)**

>Wheel the sky
on that crowded aroma
in the windows,
like a dark power
diverted to new lands.

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**Blanca Varela (Perú, 1926 - 2009)**

>It's my childhood on this coast,
under the sky so high,
heaven like no other, honey,
fast shadow, clouds of terror,
dark whirlwind of wings,
blue houses on the horizon.

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The sky as an image of the inner life (window) and the beginning (childhood), but at the same time, as an indication of what is always changing, in the terrible and the happy.

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<center>https://i.imgur.com/tCC6F1r.jpg?1</center><center>_{Landscape in the Araya Peninsula (Sucre, Venezuela) Author's photo}</center>

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**Hanni Ossott (1946- 2002)**

>Here, in this sand
staring at the sky
in sacred celebration.

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**Vicente Gallego (Spain, 1963)**

>Between the sky and the water I stop for a moment,
and then I settle in until I'm
sitting down completely.
The sea then abandons me, retreats,
and the sand gets wet, moves forward, dries and heats up
converging at one point and approaching me,
but a crab crosses at that moment
and my eyes go with the crab,
and the sky turns red in his shell,
and the sea is lost and nothing weighs.
And as I stare I catch the universe

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The modestly celebratory vision of life, expressed in the sky, but also in what cannot fail to accompany it (water, sand, birds...) is offered to us with a punctual and open word.

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<center>https://i.imgur.com/BDTsW5z.jpg?1</center><center>_{Landscape on Zaragoza beach (Nueva Esparta, Venezuela) Author photo}</center>

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Finally, as I usually do, a poem of mine where the sky is presented:

>The open sky
The moon in farewell
revealed by the tree clearings
The silent branches
the shiny leaves
The words wander
by the smoke of this hour
The god is silent and passes
required air
forgotten

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<center>https://i.imgur.com/elxPjnq.jpg?1</center><center>_{Landscape from my apartment (Sucre, Venezuela) Author photo}</center>

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#### References
Dickinson, Emily (2002). *The Basements of the Soul* (volume I). Venezuela: Edit. El otro el mismo (ULA).
Ossott, Hanni (2004). *Selects poems*. Venezuela: Bid & co. editor
Rilke, Rainer M. (1979). *Poetic Anthology* (3rd edition). España: Edit. Espasa-Calpe.
Malavé, José (2004). *Occult and proximate*. Venezuela: APUDONS - Dirección Cultura UDO
Varela, Blanca (1993). *Chosen Poetry*. España: Edit. Icaria.

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Author: @josemalavem

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