THE ENVOY The official newsletter of the Canada Caribbean Literary Alliance
I.S.S.N. – 1911‐0693
November, 2025 Issue 133 www.CanadaCaribbeanLiteraryAlliance.org
NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
By Richard M. Grove (Tai)
These two photographs below, taken by Cuban professor Adonay Pérez Luengo, now living and teaching in China, capture a quiet, poetic dialogue between light, transience, and simplicity, qualities that resonate deeply with Chinese artistic and philosophical traditions. Through her lens, Adonay seems subconsciously absorbing and echoing the Chinese artistic culture of harmony, restraint, and spiritual balance, where nature becomes both subject and metaphor. In Adonay’s first image, the single magenta bloom rises against a muted sky, framed by green and gold leaves. Its composition evokes the Daoist ideal of balance: the lone flower symbolizes life’s fragile beauty, while the fading leaf hints at impermanence. Together, they express the cyclical harmony of yin and yang, flourishing and decline, colour and shadow, presence and absence. Adonay’s second photograph expands that theme. Here, several blossoms stretch in a horizontal plane toward a bright expanse of sky, echoing the Chinese scholarly painters’ use of empty space (liú bái) to suggest infinity and spiritual openness. The blue and white of the heavens contrast with the pink petals, mirroring the quiet tension between earth and sky, mortality and transcendence. The choice of a black background around the images heightens their contemplative tone. In Chinese visual philosophy, black is not emptiness but the origin of all colour, the unseen field from which form arises. It recalls the ink wash in traditional Chinese painting, where darkness defines light, and simplicity reveals depth. Together, these photographs become a meditation on impermanence, restraint, and grace, modern in technique yet steeped in the timeless aesthetics of Chinese thought, where beauty lives not in abundance, but in the quiet meeting of light and shadow. Thank you Adonay for capturing the beauty in space and form and sharing it with the world.
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NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
by Adonay Pérez Luengo
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NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
By Adonay Pérez Luengo
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NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
By Miguel Angel Olivé Iglesias
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NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
Some Mornings Arrive with Nothing Thank you, Miguel, for your wonderful mist filled photograph Life drifts in and out of the slow dissolve the kind that muffles the world into stillness. Shapes soften, certainties blur, and the known becomes the unknown suggestion, the house, the trees, the road, all surrender to the patient shroud of uncertainty, within this veiled world there is peace if you stop and let it in, the quietude of calm waiting for your arrival, not everything needs to be seen some mornings arrive with nothing but the moment of now reminding us, even when direction cannot be seen the presence of now is always enough the mist will lift to clarity when it must, until then, we wait in this tender moment of no hurry, no worry in the breath of unknowing.
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NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
By Miguel Ángel Olivé Iglesias An unsunny morning salutes the porches with foggy banners. Seesaw choreographies of the tall power lines cross the buildings while the unresolved puzzles of life seem to spread out with extra infinitude today. I am lucky to decode the cold sensations blurred in the vaporous screen displayed in front of me; perhaps inside me too… The mist envelops inexorably. Inspiration seeps in, unexpected guest nesting in my synapses, with a sprinkle of moisture and a poem.
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NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
By Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández Morning still yawns, and the sun, shy, hasn’t fully opened its eyes. From Miguel’s balcony the island breathes in silence. Down below, the mixed market sleeps with half-shut eyelids, like a child unwilling to wake. Sacks of rice, beans, sugar, flour waiting to become bread, bread not yet bitten. Everything is still, as if time itself had paused to listen to the whisper of the mist. Ah, the mist… that haze slipping between the flamboyant trees, embracing trunks as if it’s known them forever. It’s not a fog of forgetting, but a veil of tenderness draping the garden with motherly hands. No buyers yet, perhaps only the night guard with his thermos of coffee and a gaze that has watched the whole night drift by likes a slow river. Silence is not emptiness, it is promise. A promise of footsteps, of voices, of children darting between stalls, of women asking the price of sweet potatoes, of laughter mingling with the crackle of fresh bread.
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NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
By Elismar Medina
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NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
In late April 2025, my wife Cathy and I travelled to Europe participating in a tour with the title “Poland, East Germany & World War II.” In the company of around thirty strangers, under the leadership and direction of a guide from Croatia, we traveled by motor coach visiting locations with significant connection to the last great war. Arriving in Warsaw, on Tuesday April 15th by way of Toronto with a brief stop in Amsterdam, our tour began in Warsaw, Poland with a meet and greet dinner where we met our fellow travelers in preparation for an educational journey with highlights of significant locations in Poland and Germany with a brief meander into the region of Austria where the world-famous Von Trapp family were portrayed as singing in the gazebo used in the filming of the Hollywood movie The Sound of Music. Over the course of our travels, we visited three concentration camps including Auschwitz/Birkenau, Buchenwald, and Dachau. We sojourned in Warsaw, Krakow, Wroclaw, Dresden, Berlin, Nuremberg, and Munich. The amazing thing about these cities, most of which had been entirely leveled by bombing in the war, was the restoration which replicated most of the original architecture as it had been before the war. The focus and the purpose of our vacation involved an historical recreation of things as they had been during the awful years just prior to, and during and subsequent to 1939 to 1945 and beyond, beginning with the invasion of Poland, and leading from there through the years of darkness, and then into the post-war era of allied occupation of the region. Whenever someone asked us “why would you ever want to visit a concentration camp?” Or whenever someone inquired as to whether or not we had enjoyed our vacation, I would sometimes respond “Vacation is the wrong word.” I’ve always been a student of history, and WWII has always held a special fascination for me. My wife and I are privileged to see it as our duty to look directly into and with a clear eye and open mind at both the horrors and the triumphs of our human past. Why visits Auschwitz? How not?! The essential interrobang of puzzlement and absolute necessity blending avoidance with attraction, repulsion with fascination, something I cannot explain, though I understand it entirely and also, I haven’t a clue. 10
NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
One evening after a rather grim day at Dachau, where we had been left alone to wander the grounds of that ghoulish reminder of mankind’s inhumanity, we gathered in the hotel bar and exchanged opinions as to the meaning of the day. When it came my turn to opine, I said of my own experience: Who would I have been, had I been born at the time of the holocaust? I said, I’m not Jewish, nor am I a gypsy. I’m not slow of mind or slow of body, though some might disagree with that. I’m not disabled, or mentally challenged or mentally ill. I doubt if I would have had the courage to be a political dissident. I’m not an unlucky Slav, or Pole, or person of obvious non-Arian racial origin. Perhaps I may have been a bystander, a witness turning a blind eye to suffering, though I hope that my character would not have made me a collaborator. However, given that the average age of a concentration camp guard was eighteen, meaning if they were eighteen in 1943, they would have been around ten years of age in 1933. They would have been indoctrinated in school and by the public propaganda of the day. They would likely have been members of Hitler Youth. And so, had I been a boy in Germany in 1933, I certainly might have been a concentration camp guard. What I could not have been is a Mengele, a Höss, a Heidrick, a Himmler, or an Eichmann. I am neither a psychopath nor a sociopath, a sociopath being someone without empathy, and a psychopath being someone who takes pleasure inflicting pain on others. Everyone looked at me, and I wondered what they made of my take on the day. How did I see myself in 2025, so very different from the imaginary me born in Europe in 1923, subject to the great and sweeping changes in culture and politics, nearly impossible to imagine, and only available in objective secondary recollection of one who was not there and who could not possibly know? Visit Munich and imagine the dictator ranting from the balcony to an adoring crowd comprised mostly of adulatory women. Visit the stadiums at Nuremburg and see the cathedral of lights blazing at the heavens and listen for the beating drums and marching feet and voices raised in a chorus of “Seig Heil.” Go to Wawasee and envision the cabal of co-conspirators planning the final solution in cold-minded, iron-hearted indifference to the humanity of the diaspora of the lands in storm under the dark cloud of Nazis occupation. While we were there I wondered if I would ever be able to write about my experience. Then one day I was visited by the muses who gave me the gift of a title for what would become this collection: The Tree of Common Sorrow. 11
NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
And that is all I wrote while I was there. I still wondered if I might write about my experience at all. And then the title poem emerged. And then the poems in this collection came one by one, exactly in the order in which they appear except for the poems in section ii and iii of this volume. Oh, that I should presume to add my voice to the tree of common sorrows, which is the tree of knowledge, which is the tree of life. … every tree of common sorrow Keeps a vigil in its seed
By José Alberto Pérez
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NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
By José Alberto Pérez
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NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
here in Auschwitz is a silence a holy silence a sacred silence a reverent and a filthy silence listen then, here and now in this awful quiet to the shuffling through gravel within this constancy where the slow movement of human soles come cattling through this upturning of dust smouldering at footfalls like the lifting of smoke from breath-blown ashes and we are rising out of the earth our bodies suffering the heavy buoyancy of a great weather wheeling of grasses that cling to their roots grown tall over graves those windblown seeds of the selfsame soil that scatter their lives in the gorse thriving in far-off ditches and thin on the worn-away road shoulders shrugging with puzzlement at the evil enigmas of unkind men how then with a searchlight of prayer 14
NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
these words in blue ethers seem like thumbs under silks that are blushing with light in a threadbare design for there’s an unmaking in us barely felt by caress of creation gone to shaping our clays our friable clays that crumble and fall into dust without water for we are the ghosts of such drying like vapours that fade in the wind.
… is everyone okay “Is everyone okay with the crematorium?” the German guide inquires of us as we follow him through the horrors of the holocaust at the museum of Buchenwald three generations away from the war he leads us as a bellwether would through this wilderness of buildings where once upon a time the air was redolent with the sweet stink of burnt flesh and the hiss of sizzling hair with ashes falling like cottonwood seed 15
NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
and the sun besmirched by smoke and this is April almost the anniversary of liberation “Is everyone okay with the crematorium” he speaks and none of us demure not knowing what we’ll make of the open-maw ovens those dragon gullets with cold grates yawning and ravenous for the eating away of human souls we’ve become one with the dark angels of despair like moths in winter closets we’ve become threadbare to the bone unable to look unable to look away is it this that we’ve done? I wonder this glancing inward with scissoring wings and frozen hearts.
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NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
The Blue Fog “… some inmates opened the door, and you could still see a blue fog hanging over the giant tangle of corpses.”
when they entered the room of death after the screaming had died into silence the witnesses note how a blue fog lay over the bodies of the dead and this was the end of the world this quiet reminder of life once lived while even the stones lie weeping like rocks in the rain or the shorelines struck by the coming in of the sea and this was a tidal remainder of the cruel wave of moonglow eating the wind as it howled like a storm over water so, calm it was in the morning it seemed settled and loving the light
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NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
By Mandy Portelles
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NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
By Mandy Portelles
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NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
By Mandy Portelles
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NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
By Mandy Portelles
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NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
Frank Slide now Crowsnest Pass I heard about it before I saw it Frank town buried by landslide kids in footsie pajamas, a dog by the fireplace, grandma in her pine rocker, the transient looking for work, the husband saved by chopping wood somewhere else that night, helping out a friend, the one who came back to grief and debris young Lilian Clarke returning from late shift to the ruin of a town under rock-pile. Just like Pompeii the spoon in the bowl, hands turned to stone reaching at the door, the dog curled into statue. A rumble resonating all the way to Cochrane that night, and up my spine. We sat in the truck, looking through the windshield at a plaster dog with marble eyes scratching a calcified itch, rising from the dust and coal-smudge scene, painted smoke and limestone shale. And I thought of how the CPR migrants moved those stones one by one as in a tomb its stone rolled away to make space for the resurrection of a new town, and a new line, and the few who were spared praying seven times seven thanks under Turtle Mountain; the way they blasted rock in a spiral right through like Kicking Horse Pass. And a man, Coquette, running three miles to warn the train chugging towards buried tracks … Wait, I thought, I never saw the rubble at all, just heard the tale of baby Gladys’ survival in a bale of hay; the laze and drone of truck-hum
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NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
put me to sleep as we drove that four-day drive to the Rockies. Wait, I thought, I am dreaming now of the buried city, some treasury of memory petrified like a bug in amber, horse bones in the tar-sands, and, look, here is the fossil dog rising from its curled epitaph coming right out of the dream towards our truck that wolfish dog he rescued with one blue eye, mountain dog in my dreams digging deep in the rubble for something still alive.
Digging Where did it come from, this call? to the interior you will tree plant in BC forests, four hours by chopper from Prince George. The cork boots, belt and shovel, bandanas and bungees, tin stove and tarp all packed, the many days’ drive in an ancient van sealed with shiny hope and duct tape. Your puppy ebullience bounding over the phone perhaps naïve, perhaps full-faith, both/and it is your own interior you want to dig into, four months without power, a phone, posts, or a store four months of trekking deep into tree floor and spring flora, steel spikes on your boots, hard resolve to stay, sweat, survive the entire time, learn thriving. Today I bought you a simple bar of bio soap, pocket knife, tin cup you’ll grow a beard, have much to reflect on in your solitary tent, alone with your shovel and bag, 23
NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
no one to banter with but bears and the wind. You say you’ve been meditating daily, as you tighten your core and build up your back strength you want to take only what can fit in your pack. I see your shoulders lift, as your mind learns to unburden.
Garter Snake I saw you sensing me see you. Now that is something. Did my step crumple the earth? and warn you? Did your tongue sniff my presence? in a split flick of in-breath? Did your tympanum let in a listen, earless yet hearing? And yet it was I who froze in my tracks, cold quartz stone in my throat, a little choke imagining you a baby rattler, the ones they say have more untrained venom than their parents. I stood there, petrified as grey shale in this layered shield; you slithered away into clay clumps. Goliath and the garter snake I had no boots; you had no rattle; I meant you no harm, loving my own young days when my brother and I would hold your coiling kin cool in our gentle palms, not as sibilant prey but a touching prayer, in benevolent silence. You do such good in the garden; even your cousin the mighty Massasauga has her place. Let me not freeze in fear when you part the grass, but stand rather, in solidarity, noting 24
NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
your faint stripes, yellow ribbon, perfect pattern. Let Silence and stealth inspire awe. O Felix Culpa, oh, necessary snake in our field. You make me step lightly, tread careful, watch my footprint on earth.
By Nandy de Almas
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NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
Artificial Intelligence Rivers overflow their banks houses are demolished cars swept away by the raging waters: man has disrupted nature. In vain wisdom’s warning words. Would a chip, implanted in the brain, offer more wisdom or even more blindness and indoctrination?
What Will remain Everything that ever lived is sooner or later erased by time. What remains is the beauty on earth which man created before: beautiful constructions, sculptures, words and music. But what will remain of us for those who come after us as a trace? What else but tasteless constructions, pollution of water and air, the greed of the present.
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NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
Witnesses of a time Just as the rain erases traces left behind, disappears by a technical problem or decision of higher powers what we once entrusted to floppy, computer, VHS or CD. What will soon remain of us, only yellowed that once was written on paper by typewriter or pen and of those who come after us, nothing at all? Terror The war is no longer declared but continues. The unheard has become daily. Ingeborg Bachmann Homes destroyed by missiles innocent people, women, children, killed by the haughty madness of misleaders. Unwinged the dove, the truth, raped by lies. Unless prayers So many calamities take place on earth continually and increasingly plagued by disasters and injustice, although millions of prayers are daily sent to heaven. But which God, who speaks all those languages, can give them a hearing, when it is man who disrupts even the heavenly vault? 27
NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
Peace Dove It is raining it is raining sadness for innocent victims for the destruction of a country for the escape of murderous violence. Hungry, a turtle dove leaves from the shelter of her tree like a noose the black ring around her neck. Petrified At the town square stands the statue of a war hero. He looks ahead as if he looks to the future as if he looks for a time without wars a time of worldwide peace but his eyes are petrified. A Victim Not yet closed but wide-eyed and full of horror the eyes pursed the lips because time was too short for a farewell greeting for a last prayer.
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NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
Smart Phone In the waiting room sits a large number of travelers. With one notable exception, all of them are busy with a little thing called smart phone that fascinates them all the time. With two thumbs at the same time they write their stories, meaningful or not they are written, and sent out into the world. Only one person does not write, but reads, he reads a book. Doesn’t he have anything to say? Hope It is winter, the chilly wind has torn off the last leaves from the trees which before were protection and accommodation for the birds. They shiver in the cold but still whistle because they also hope for better times. Germain Droogenbroodt from The Road of Being, Southern Arizona Press, USA
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NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
Unconcerned rosy announcing upcoming spring apricot blossoms Their wings opened heavenward hankering birds of paradise Its roots in the mud blooms whiter than the whitest white the lotus flowers The power of water imperturbably following its very own road A morning fisher at the motionless water surface wavers red the hope
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NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
In Vain All day long it thundered and lightninged as if heaven wanted to knock at whatever door to be heard, concerned about the downfall not only of the climate but also, of humanity. Gazing onto the sea Looking deeply into the sea, As the sun sets too slowly, Traces of time linger in my heart, Lost in the dusk. They were standing in the sand Where the ocean’s sound Brings back the melancholy of old love. Taking a moment In the late evening, Twisted by nostalgia, The deeper it flows through my veins, The stronger is my desire to see The dance of mermaids In the blue depths. I keep gazing into the sea. Waves kiss the shore, Giving divine embraces. Eternal peace settles within me, Accompanied by the requiem
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NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
Of seagull’s cries. Until the meteors ignite the night, Setting it ablaze. from Dewdrops, 100 haiku by Germain Droogenbroodt, published Japanese, English, Spanish, Dutch by JUNPA, Kyoto, Japan
By Wency Rosales
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NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
By Wency Rosales
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NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
By Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández When the sun hides and warmth sleeps upon my shoulders, when your eyes shine like two fearless stars in the night, I will know you’ve arrived, even if time has stolen my strength. I’ll welcome you in silence, like someone embracing a memory still burning on the skin. Your hair, wet and curled, will be the rain I never forget, the caress no one sees but that calls my name. No one will know you are the love of my life, because the world does not recognize what the soul keeps secret. We will walk upon fire, and your feet will gather ashes, but there will be no pain, only the dance of eternity beneath our steps. We will sleep together, like two leaves clinging to the current of a river without end, and in that long dream we’ll fall through a waterfall until we reach the most infinite place, where love needs no name, no body, no time.
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NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
Anna Yin was Mississauga’s Inaugural Poet Laureate (2015-2017) and has authored seven poetry collections and four books of translations. Her poems/translations won awards and appeared in ARC Poetry, The New York Times, Queen’s Quarterly, China Daily, Modern Poetry in Translation, on CBC Radio, etc. She teaches Poetry Alive. Her website: annapoetry.com
As our boat passed through the Rideau Canal lock, a fish surged up and took the hook a flicker of pulsing, vivid life gleaming beneath the rod. Was it loneliness, hunger, or simple wonder? I cast it back into the evening water, white spray rising through deepening blue. Tonight, I think I’ll sleep in peace: I on the shore, you in the river.
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NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
My heart is a house of four rooms, each holding a lover Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter. Their doors open and close in turn, singing songs both ancient and unborn. I breathe a prayer: let my heart be an ocean, vast enough to cradle all the lovers, all the dreamers, those remembered, those yet to arrive. We could be each other’s oracles, our hands joined in silent knowing. Listen our souls resound, a vow unspoken, yet heard. Love is not meant to divide us. We belong to each other, beneath the hush of endless sky, upon a floor of heaven.
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NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
Anna Yin’s translation from Yen Ai-Lin’s Chinese poem How to let flowers bloom on the moon? How to let my tear flow into your eyes? How to let memory turn into seeds and sprout, perhaps, in reality? Between us, so far mountains, oceans, lands, crowds, deserts and five continents, the earth and the moon. Only air connects us, Yet it is our prison. Closer was our adolescence. Then, your shadow has been the calendar page I cannot tear away From my heart. I am growing old. How can you remain young as the moon? How to let me love you again? Or even hate you anew? The flower has never opened on the moon. You have never tasted the bitterness of my tears.
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NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
The Wave The mind is a terrible thing to lose. It is difficult to frame the question why bother getting old when you could’ve died so young on the crest of the wave that brought you here with a few good ideas and a suitcase full of purpose, the leaves soaking sunlight, the sea that never sat still, a book in your hands and tomorrow so different from the day before, the words rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat perfectly suited to turn the page and move your best lines forward now curled up in a wave a few million years older than you, the sea calling out repeatedly, You’ll never stop ageing, You’ll never stop getting old, the wave that’s coming in at this moment without a word of a lie touching the shore for the very first time.
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NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
An Evolutionary Minute I play with my hair as an example of something to do as a human. I curl it around my finger with the help of an opposable thumb. I sit with the sea lapping at my feet the sun in its place, the boats in the ample arms of the bay. A couple with child completely consumed by the cell in their hands walk the beach at low tide while a crab, miniscule but quick and discerning, crawls back to the sea, writing its 200 million year-old history into the sand.
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NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
Here I can’t think of a time I wasn’t here, the air fragrant with frangipani, the ocean at our feet, yours dangling off the rocks worn away by the sweat of a labour force millions of years old that keeps the sea in motion, the tide coming in and you never that far from taking a Selfie to tell the world where you are.
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NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
The same The air was the same as where we left off half a century ago, the aroma of flowers applauding how we spent our lives the last fifty years, the sea trembling, the sky trembling, the city sometimes taking over but never for too long, and the wind occasionally changing venues, yet for us the same sun, the same moon, the same hands holding on to the beach, repeating ourselves in the waves as we once did in bare feet, the light in our eyes and the same sea just over our shoulders.
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NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
By Wency Rosales
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NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
By Wency Rosales
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NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
By Wency Rosales
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NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
By Wency Rosales
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NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
Mountain Walk Behind me the lovers sit in their relic cars as I stand above the shoal, listen to the surf break over subterranean life. On this primordial shore the land slowly rises from the dolphin-blue and amphibians crawl through the snowy tide. Wind sweeps through tentacles of this coral sea among intimate lost voices. Through the blurred pines I climb toward the peak of lights the four moons of Jupiter. Rain pellets crack the snow in unknown codes. I look for signs, try to humanize this landscape with words, but there is only the wind speaking in dumb tones? The black branches are twisted girders, melted iron, torn cables. And the trees. What are they? Wounded soldiers speaking of their deaths, shamans chanting their prophecies. The path leads to a lifeless arena, an empty proscenium. No stairs, a flagless pole, outspread tablets I cannot decipher, a row of empty tripods. Eerie light hovers over frozen cairns, hulks. Down in the mist an aqueous eye stare at me. The wind whines through the red earth.
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NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
Snow Are there not treasures in the snow? It awakens me to colour and forms out of its anonymity. Beneath its smooth surface I see idiosyncrasies: microprisms breaking into chromatic scales . . . myriad globes glowing . . . glacial spores blossoming . . . What I love is the mathematical precision with which it covers the earth in frozen solutions. As I walk across the tabula rasa, deeper into the shifting planes, there is a geometric excitement: fine logarithms, musical phrases, a wonderful amnesia. Snowflakes, words tumble changing infinities in fin-like speed. New possibilities whirl out of violet haloes and the Milky Way. Snow paradise. Carousels of evening horns and bells. You cover everything in a philosophical eloquence.
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NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
Rain There are days like today when all I want is rain. Rain, the rich paradox, has a misty clarity continually transforming light and shape. Rain makes me feel the presence of that light. In this darkening twilight, riding the shuttle bus, I am in love with all the rainy days, ambiguous and naked like forgotten lovers. Words breathe upon the windowpane. I can just make out the chaotic traffic . . . the work camps . . . the space way . . . the Christmas tree . . . Picasso’s and the erotic floor show in the heavens . . . and there in the clouds float an orange bar, a de Kooning . . . In the moist suspension I spin on through the rain, the swimmer as he breaks the waves. In tangible silence I glide through the twilight trajectory, toward the dark comfortable place I call home.
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NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
Shortcut Through the Renous Even before I came to New Brunswick the mover had spoken of its curves and twists, "Impossible to drive in winter." One October I tried driving it— vans and cars loading at the gas station. Turbulent clouds gathered and ten minutes in winter swept over us, blinding the roads. Already I can see the green halo of growth, the beginning chlorophyll, a purplish breath announcing leaves, birches shedding scrolls of skin-tinted bark. Drive over the hill, the black open stream. Put on the brakes. Stop. Outside, sounds are everywhere. The snow is protean as molecular bonds break, ice rising in the wavering steam. There is splash in the ebony water; the brown ribbed-bottom ripples, a slithering of mud things. Trout swim below phosphorescent ceilings of ice. Slime speckles the surface, a green cauliflower. On this bridge’s edge, a board is exposed, the faded texture of an old railway tie. I need this spring: this dark inlet is a door. Learn to let go of the heart’s driftwood. Listen, the voices of clarity blue jays, orioles. By the bridge, clear brown water flows through the melting ice, through the fissure of winter from a deep, quiet opening. 49
NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
By Wency Rosales
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NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
By Wency Rosales
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NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
By Wency Rosales
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NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
These four poems were previously published in my collection Invisible Parables, Ekstasis Editions, 2025
TIMESCALE A soft outline of the park at dawn, across the grassland of Beacon Hill Park, a few trees they grow lonely when separated from each other like other things. Life varied nature plays tricks on us since only the reality of the moment is precise, by avoiding all sentiments for their lack of perspective and objective credibility. Negative frenemies from the past are teaching us how to navigate the present by balancing both sides of the timetable before stepping out. In a distance the trees like silver statues, at ease with internal prayer, a simple prayer that creates the aura that never fails, for a moment the mask of life slips away, showing genuine insight into being one with human.
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NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
A SIMPLE THING The simple, useful line multiplies to invent itself. But how do you translate the language of life and its outpost of reason for our existence, when we feel like the toys in its hands occasionally broken between exhausted pages. Around thin light of the last day of summer and only one step to autumn the colours are disappearing without a goodbye but from the blurred horizon the splashes of gold appear on the back of mountain as if put there by a nonchalant hand of painter.
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NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
ANCESTRY When against the wharf of the Pacific Ocean, a deep wave came and burned itself into the stone, the sun was carved from it. The sun was in the tone of an emulsified orange. The first man called it God.
By Wency Rosales
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NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
FIRST SNOW for Laurence Green grass, dreamless at close sight. The white glow of the mountain releases the snow in long snakelike routes, affixed with pieces of branches and twigs. Last week I found a translucent stone here a matter of mystery, I raised my hand and waved, the dove began to fly and turned into falling snow. We are an elusive part of being, captured in the cacophony of time, and anything can happen when the thought is shaken and unrolled. Try to laugh at some weird conclusions, life is giving you them for free.
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NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
The Silent Dance He circled wavering like a thieving crow. Dreamed of the time when we both be rich and famous. Why don’t you . . . I heard him wishing. There was no light. I could stop the murmuring. the brilliant cherry lips a kind of testimonial telling me the truth Exactly like you. Curled up delicately. Patryaja Williams
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NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
By Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández Don’t return to where you were once happy. Memory is a shattered mirror reflecting what no longer exists. Melancholy is a trap, it whispers with a sweet voice but drags you into the abyss of what was and will never be again. The landscapes have shed their skin, the laughter has faded, and the people… time has carried them away like leaves in the wind. Don’t go back. Keep that place like an untouched reliquary in the warmest corner of your soul. The past you already know it, there are no surprises in its corners. Life, on the other hand, awaits you with new paths, with suns you have yet to see, with faces you have yet to love. Walk. Don’t look back. What was made you who you are. What’s coming will make you who you’ll become.
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NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
By Joel de la Paz
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NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
By Wilkier
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NOVEMBER 2025 ENVOY-133 EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández, CCLA Ambassador, Editor Miguel Ángel Olivé Iglesias, CCLA Cuban President, Assistant Editor Adonay Pérez Luengo, reviewing editor Katharine Beeman, reviewing editor Miriam Estrella Vera Delgado, CCLA Cuban Poet Laureate, reviewing editor Wency Rosales, Cuban photography curator
joyph@nauta.cu joyphccla@gmail.com jorgealbertoalcc@icloud.com
FROM THE EDITOR: IN OUR UPCOMING ISSUES, WE WOULD LIKE SUBMISSIONS FROM EVERY CCLA MEMBER SO THAT YOU RECEIVE SOME DESERVED PUBLICITY WHILE WE ARE NURTURED BY YOU. BOOK LAUNCHES? POETRY EVENTS? LET US KNOW ABOUT THEM AND WE WILL PRINT UP THE INFORMATION IN THE ENVOY. 61