Kirmen Uribe
Kirmen Uribe Poems
Saving the birds was our mission that whole winter.
Saving the birds imprisoned in the snow.
All along the beach most of them were hidden,
nestled in the shade of the black sea.
...
Children's Song
There's a friend I hate.
Whenever I want to climb a tree
...
He never said I love you.
Even though he worked in the steel mills
in those times, through and through
he remained a farmer.
...
Father lost his wedding ring in the ocean once. Like all the trawlermen, he'd
take it from his finger to put on a neck chain, not to lose the finger as the net went out.
Several tides after that, our aunt, while cleaning some hake, found a gold ring
in the belly of one of the fish.
...
My breasts are small and my eyes round.
Your legs long and cool as the freshet
that runs down from the fountain.
I bite your neck,
...
Though a favor to the feet, to the shoes
the sandals are bare skeletons.
An olive tree lives two thousand years
but tends to remember nothing.
...
In our desert there is no sand.
There are growing boys
who cross the steel barriers and
play soccer on the thruway.
...
Remember to call home before too long.
To see the long reeds when they are in motion.
Not to punish myself as much as that again.
To miss the last train and wait for the next.
...
Look. May has come in.
It's strewn those blue eyes all over the harbor.
Come, I haven't had word of you in ages.
You're constantly terrified,
...
There was a time a river ran through here,
there where the benches and the paving start.
A dozen rivers more underlie the city
if you believe the oldest citizens.
...
Heroin had been as sweet as sex
she used to say, at one time.
The doctors have been saying now she won't get worse,
to go day by day, take things easy.
...
He heard the first cuckoo at the beginning of April.
Because he'd been feeling on edge, maybe,
from an inclination to order the chaos, maybe,
he wanted to know which notes the cuckoo sang.
...
My father and uncle were six years old when they first
went out with the boats, and learned seamanship on the Bustio.
The captains of the time were tough,
...
Kirmen Uribe Biography
Kirmen Uribe (pronounced [ˈkiɾmen uˈɾibe]; born October 5, 1970) is a Basque-language writer, and one of the most relevant writers of his generation in Spain. He won the National Prize for Literature in Spain in 2009 for his first novel Bilbao-New York-Bilbao, a work that was acclaimed as a literary event. The languages into which the novel has been translated already exceed fourteen, including French (Gallimard) and Japanese (Hakusui Sha). His poetry collection Meanwhile Take My Hand (Graywolf, 2007), translated into English by Elizabeth Macklin, was a finalist for the 2008 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. The first draft of his last novel Mussche (translated into Spanish as Lo que mueve el mundo, 2012) was completed during a residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito (CA). His works have been published on several American publications such as The New Yorker, Open City or Little Star. Kirmen Uribe was born in Ondarroa (Basque Country), a small fishing town about one hour from Bilbao. Uribe's father (who died in 1999) was a trawlerman and his mother was a homemaker. He studied Basque Philology at the University of the Basque Country–Gasteiz, and did his graduate studies in Comparative Literature in Trento, Italy. In October 2009 he was awarded the Spanish Literature Prize, for his novel Bilbao–New York–Bilbao. For the same work he had received the 2008 Critics' Prize for a novel written in Basque.)
The Best Poem Of Kirmen Uribe
Birds In Winter
Saving the birds was our mission that whole winter.
Saving the birds imprisoned in the snow.
All along the beach most of them were hidden,
nestled in the shade of the black sea.
The birds were black, too.
From the coverts we'd take them and carry them home
in our coat pockets.
The tiniest birds, barely contained
in even our child-sized hands.
Later, we'd lay them beside the warm stove.
But the birds never lasted long.
In two or three hours they died.
We didn't see why,
didn't understand their bad luck.
After all, we'd given them
breadcrumbs moistened in milk,
held to their mouths, to eat,
and furnished a nest for each
with our most colorful winter scarves.
But it was useless, they kept on dying.
Furious, our parents told us
not to bring home any more birds,
they were dying of too much heat.
And that nature is wise,
spring would come with its own birds.
We sat and considered their statements,
it could be that they will be right.
Still and all, the very next day
we would flock off back to the beach
to save the birds,
though we knew
it was fruitless as snow in the sea.
And our birds kept dying, these birds taking life.
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