Basilio Belliard

Things

​All things are one single thing.
The rose is a single word, a thing
that longs to be a house;
a house inhabited by flames of dreams.
So, all words wish to be
the thing that serves nothing, in awakening,
a thousand wings undone by the air,
trifles of the thousand words that say nothing;
they are verses that erase like sand
the shadows of the waters that flow
empty in the letters of the names,
in the white breath of the hour,
when their bodies walk over steps of ice;
memory of the things that desire oblivion,
until the dreams of things
surrender to the white death of the eyes.
What is the sun if we do not dream it?
Life is the dream of the thing
that we remember upon waking.
 

• THINGS
  

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All things are one single thing.
The rose is a single word, a thing
that longs to be a house;
a house inhabited by flames of dreams.
So, all words wish to be
the thing that serves nothing, in awakening,
a thousand wings undone by the air,
trifles of the thousand words that say nothing;
they are verses that erase like sand
the shadows of the waters that flow
empty in the letters of the names,
in the white breath of the hour,
when their bodies walk over steps of ice;
memory of the things that desire oblivion,
until the dreams of things
surrender to the white death of the eyes.
What is the sun if we do not dream it?
Life is the dream of the thing
that we remember upon waking.
 
 

Basilio Belliard is a poet, essayist, and literary critic from the Dominican Republic. He holds a doctorate in philosophy from the University of the Basque Country, is a professor at the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo, a full member of the Academy of Sciences, and a corresponding member of the Dominican Academy of Language. He was a visiting professor-researcher at the University of Orléans, France, where his bilingual anthology Reves insulares was published in 2015 by Paradigme. He also served as a teaching assistant at New Mexico State University.
He is the author of, among others: Sueño escrito (National Poetry Prize Salomé Ureña, 2002), Los pliegues del bosque (poetry, 2008), Piel del aire (poetry, 2011), Oficio de arena (short fictions, 2011), Soberanía de la pasión (essay, 2012), Prácticas de sueños (prose poems, 2014), El imperio de la intuición (essay, 2013), Escrito en el vacío. Máximas, aforismos y sentencias (2017), El lince y el arco iris (microrrelatos, Huerga & Fierro, Madrid, 2019), Ritual de las ideas (articles, 2018), El ojo de Ion: poesía y filosofía (Funglode Essay Prize, 2020), Círculo abierto (essay, Amargord, Madrid, 2019), Octavio Paz: temporalidad y soledad (essay, Banco Central, 2021), La intemperie (poetry, Isla Negra, Puerto Rico, 2022), Todo es aire. Antología poética personal (Huerga & Fierro, 2023), El huevo roto y la razón (ensay, Huerga & Fierro, 2025), among others.
He has edited and co-edited various Dominican poetry anthologies both in the country and abroad. He was founding director of the magazine País Cultural and executive director of the National Council of Culture at the Ministry of Culture. His texts have been translated into Italian and French. He has participated in numerous literary congresses and poetry festivals in Spain, Italy, France, Mexico, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, Argentina, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Uruguay, Haiti, and the United States. Currently, he is Director of Research and of the journal In-Arte at the Faculty of Arts of the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo, where he has taught for more than 25 years, both in the Faculty of Arts and the Faculty of Humanities.

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