Drawings From the Air
Calmly to learn the drawings of the air
The images rescued from our dreams
The secret dictates of music
The flight of the bird
To flow with the water
And simple in the fig tree leaves
And in the water divine the circlings of the sun
Crowned with silences the afternoon
Descends and hides
Bird returning, project your divinity
Awaken me to morning
Give me the message of this forbidden world
Decypher in your plumage the colours of this life
To learn from your sacred lineage
Union with heaven and every season
To learn with your song another language
And with your flight the essence
Which in silence waits within me
(Translated into English by Jonathan Boulting)
(From “Un Duro Rival”, book “La torre sumergida” Barcelona, March Editor, 2009)
The flight of the bird
To flow with the water
And simple in the fig tree leaves
And in the water divine the circlings of the sun
Crowned with silences the afternoon
Descends and hides
Bird returning, project your divinity
Awaken me to morning
Give me the message of this forbidden world
Decypher in your plumage the colours of this life
To learn from your sacred lineage
Union with heaven and every season
To learn with your song another language
And with your flight the essence
Which in silence waits within me
(Translated into English by Jonathan Boulting)
(From “Un Duro Rival”, book “La torre sumergida” Barcelona, March Editor, 2009)
Litany of Dread
I'm frightened and I shouldn't be
I know the ladder to the heavens
The clouds the birds are strung along by
The laughter of butterflies
I'm frightened and I shouldn't be
I understand the light, its discourse
But it's cold it's night
And everything is thick, erect, everything cuts
I'm frightened I'm two or no one
Always beside you alone
I'm frightened of these hands
These arms this back
This voice at the end of the line
Pure lava in the stomach of ocean
They've taught me to think in infinities
They've revealed the arpeggios of silence
But I'm frightened of me my enemy
My self sown into my skin
My daily companion
Like a dead tongue
Like a sparse shadow
Like an Our Father
I'm frightened and it's day already
(Translated into English by Jonathan Boulting)
(From “Life in sips”, book 'The Disobedient Gaze', Devenir Editorial, Madrid 2013)
Statue
Step by step you go
undoing yourself
Into fragments of dumbfounded being
Way of the snow
Becoming statue
Of salt
Of nought
Music inoculates your soul with her potion so
To save or annihilate
Or isn't it she who can kill
Or sing the nightingale into singing?
(Translated into English by Jonathan Boulting)
(from “Between syllable and oblivion”, book 'The Disobedient Gaze', Devenir Editorial, Madrid 2013)
Author’s Bionote:
*Adriana Hoyos was born in Bogotá, Colombia and lives in Madrid, Spain. She is one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Spanish-language poetry. Her work, shaped by a profound musical sensibility and a keen awareness of language, creates a space in which the verbal, the visual, and the auditory engage in dialogue as forms of thought. The author of a substantial and continually evolving body of work, she has published “La torre sumergida”, “La mirada desobediente”, “Del otro lado”, “No es a mí a quien lees”, and “La sed con que mirabas (antología amorosa)” in Spain; “Esa que canta hacia adentro” and the anthology “Lo que me trajeron las palabras” in Colombia; “Geometrias da voz” and “Não é a mim que lês” in Portugal; and the anthology “Ono što su mi donele reči” in Serbia. Her poetry has been translated into around ten languages and presented at literary festivals and gatherings in more than twenty countries across Europe, Africa, and the Americas. In 2026, she received the Dámaso Alonso Prize, awarded by the Academia Hispanoamericana de Buenas Letras in Madrid, and the Josefa de Óbidos Prize, conferred by the Câmara Municipal de Óbidos, the José Saramago Foundation, and OEI Portugal, both in recognition of her literary career.
(Photo by Mikhaela Mikhaylova)