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Una mujer morena

resuelta en luna
se derrama hilo a hilo
sobre la cuna.
Ríete, niño,
que te traigo la luna
cuando es preciso.

Alondra de mi casa,
ríete mucho.
Es tu risa en tus ojos
la luz del mundo.
Ríete tanto
que mi alma al oírte
bata el espacio.

Tu risa me hace libre,
me pone alas.
Soledades me quita,
cárcel me arranca.
Boca que vuela,
corazón que en tus labios
relampaguea.

Es tu risa la espada
más victoriosa,
vencedor de las flores
y las alondras
Rival del sol.
Porvenir de mis huesos
y de mi amor.

Miguel Hernandez
Nanas de la cebolla

Miguel Hernandez, "tweets" and regular expressions

Miguel Hernandez, a shepherd-poet, born and raised in the small town of Orihuela, close to Alicante, was a prolific reader since very early. In one of his early poems, "Leyendo", he gives one of most discreet and subtle descriptions of the joy of reading. A young shepherd spends most of his day reading in full harmony with the surrounding provincial landscape.

I tried to follow his example spending most of last Saturday reading an anthology of his poems, one of my favourite books from my time in Spain and one of the few, which made it all the way back with me in Athens a year and two days ago. But my reading could only last this long. By Sunday I had to start preparing the lectures for my upcoming classes. Upon leaving for Crete, Ι packed a few clothes, my notebook and a couple of Bioinformatics books, but refused to leave the poems on my desk. On the boat, instead of preparing slides on regular expressions, I went back to "Leyendo" and Hernandez's "Poemas Sueltos".

I thought I had found the most rewarding way to remember my rusty spanish when I came up with a puzzling recurrence of a certain word. In the beginning of the poem, the sun is greeted by a bird.

Preludia un ave un gorjeo

I faintly remembered "gorjeo" meaning tweet and was about to congratulate myself when upon reaching the last verse I was puzzled with a second instance of that "tweet"

Trunca el ave su gorgeo...

Only now "gorjeo" was spelled as "gorgeo". As my spanish is rather good but still far from allowing me to resolve ambiguities of this kind, I had to turn to a dictionary. In fact I turned to more than one and it turned out that all of them agreed on the "tweet" 's correct spelling being "gorjeo". This could only mean two things. Either there was a typo in my edition of the poem or Miguel had made a spelling mistake. Yet another ambiguity, but one that could not be resolved. I spent the last three days in Crete where an alternative edition of Miguel Hernandez's poems was obviously unreachable. It turned out to be equally difficult to find one in Athens or the web. The only version of the poem I could get was the one I have in my edition of Austral Poesia. Thus I was unable to verify or rule out Miguel's spelling error.

As gorjeo/gorgeo was doing circles in my head, unable to decide which version looked better, regardless of spelling rules, I thought that maybe I had the perfect example of a regular expression right there in front of me.

After all, gor[jg]eo was still rhyming perfectly well.