Anthropology graduate student Fredy Rodriguez-Mejia was one of the poets to read a poem at the Festival of Listening put on by the RCAH Center for Poetry on Friday. All of the poetry was recited in a language other than English and no translations were provided so that the audience would focus on the way that the words sounded instead of the meaning. Rodriguez-Mejia has been writing poetry for about 10 years and only recently started writing in English. Although most of the poems read were famous poems, Rodriguez-Mejia chose to read a poem he wrote about his hometown of Copan, Honduras, which he wrote after returning home for the first time in four years.

An English translation of Rodriguez-Mejia’s poem:

Just a Tangible Space (Rodriguez-Mejia changed the title of the poem for the English translation)

When I rested awhile

Atop of the washed out hill

I could see in the distance

A mountain,

Every tree filled with water.

Blue summit,

Olive green skirt.

Between she and I

A space filled with honey

Got tangled up in my hands.

It was a tangible emptiness

Far from being a space.

The coconut palms,

Walked amid the old roof tiles

And the swallows

Emitted a historic song.

The dead light rain

Escaped the ancient tiles

At the pace of a water wheel

Like a transient fog leaving the fern.

The dull banana leaves

Cut with wind scissors.

The old walls

Inlayed in the air,

Kept.

They kept hours

Of countless serenades

That no longer mean anything.

Now they walk about,

Every now and then,

In the delirious dreams

Of the melancholic ones

That is everyone.