Like an overturned sun in the chest, Villena

An arrow against indifference, an assault of bitter beauty, an awakening... no less than that could be felt when discovering, among the pages of the textbook, a poem like Canción del sainete póstumo (Song of the posthumous sainete).

 

And already at dawn, over the crowd / will gravitate the solemn concept of "never", / then will come the consolation of continuing existence... / And the morning will come... but you, you won't come! Learning those verses written by Rubén MartínezVillena (Alquízar, 1899-Havana, 1934)was not enough, one had to immerse oneself in them as in an exploration of the senses, and look for more of that thrill.

 

That is why El párpadoabierto (the open eyelid, Editorial LetrasCubanas, 2004), a poetic anthology by Villena, is a feast of sensibility: one can find many texts built from simplicity and cleanliness, with a tremendously deep poetic vision; texts whose reading comes out different, in tune with the light that is "music in the throat of the lark".

 

Ruben made poetry with his words and with his life, even when he "disavowed" that literary vocation, he continued to assume the revolutionary cause as only a poet can: with the fever of total surrender.
Raúl Roa wrote of him: "He embodied the prototype of the revolutionary intellectual of his time, as José Martí was of his own". It is not grandiloquent the praise for that being from the transparent green of his eyes, the sharpness of his ideas, and the sacrifice of his doing, magnetized.

 

"He was a terrible polemicist: he either surrendered or crushed. His power of persuasion used to be irresistible. And, as if born of a hidden vein, he was always more concerned about his neighbor than about himself. In his multiple spirit, chords and counterpoints intertwined without fraying the harmonic warp of the symphony," Roa said.

 

He also said that for Villena "the discovery of José Martí -letter incarnated in action- was as if the sun suddenly burst into his chest and flashed in his blood." And that is exactly what one feels when reading verses like "and yet he keeps in his brain – mad with sunsets-,/ the dream of the last twilight flame! (El Faro, the lighthouse).

 

Ruben, with the twisted impulse and the sacred longing to glimpse in life his dreams of death, always dragged in poetry, as in existence, the need for the great: These wings so short and these clouds so high... / And these wings wanting to conquer those clouds! (The useless yearning).

 

The open eyelid speaks of the poet's fascination for the history of independence, and of his obsessions: death, beauty, love; he weaves exquisite pieces, from irony or wit, such as Defensa del miocardioinocente (Defense of the average heart) and Homenaje al monosílaboilustre (Hommage to the illustrious monosyllabic).

 

In the prologueof the book, Juan Nicolás Padrón Barquín affirms of Villena that he was and is "lyrical and insinuating at the same time, tender and mature, docile for love and rebellious for injustices, poet of feeling and reason, universal and Cuban as if it were the same thing... His first desire was poetry and he died without completing the last one: the Revolution".

 

Biographical data would be enough to understand who he was, his greatness, but it is enough to read a fragment like this one from Hexaedrorosa (Pink hexahedron), to know that the commotion inhabited him, and that it is essential to go in search of that ray:

 

I love you...! / By your side, or in your absence; in reality or in dream; in the intimacy of the kind corner or before the formidable lullaby of the sea; in the moonlit night or black and dotted with questioning stars; in the wonderful and tender moment of dawn; in the meridian stupor of the day or in the pensive golden twilight... / In all places and at all times I have already told you the words I thought I would never utter.