and

a blog with cultural bulimia.

Wednesday, January 07, 2004

21 grams

QUESTION: Do you know anything about the Venezuelan poem that Sean Penn and Naomi Watts are talking about in the restaurant in 21 Grams?
The earth turned to bring us closer,
it spun on itself and within us,
and finally joined us together in this dream
as written in the Symposium.
Nights passed by, snowfalls and solstices;
time passed in minutes and millennia.
An ox cart that was on its way to Nineveh
arrived in Nebraska.
A rooster was singing some distance from the world,
in one of the thousand pre-lives of our fathers.
The earth was spinning with its music
carrying us on board;
it didn’t stop turning a single moment
as if so much love, so much that’s miraculous
was only an adagio written long ago
in the Symposium’s score.

The Earth Turned to Bring Us Closer
Eugenio Montejo
(translated by Peter Boyle)