THE ONE THAT UNCOVERS THUNDER. José Hugo Fernández on Lidice Megla's Poetry.

The content of lyric poetry is the poet himself, so warned us Hegel with more reason than a saint, about two hundred years ago. Also, with more reason than Walter Benjamin, who a century later, diagnosed the crisis of lyricism, attributing it to the progressive divorce between the city and the countryside, plus other controversial motivations. Before and after this Benjaminian skid, there have been who assumed – and still do – the lyrical verse to be something transcended by the let's say, modern ways of poetizing. However, that primordial maxim of Hegel remains immovable, reborn with each new light of the sun, like the saffron crocus.

The obsolescence of the lyrical is unthinkable, as it is trying to surmise the poet’s inner world regardless of how far behind, we try to leave certain formal resources that seemed to limit it. Hegel saw it in his poetics (as current as wrongly forgotten in the present times) when he argued that lyricism is a passage to reach the abysses of the being, the precinct where the spirit of the real lies, which in turn consists in the impossibility of finding definitive answers.

A statement as cardinal as this has never been lacking since ancient Greece to the present times. Perhaps, this is why there is still a reluctance to accept lyric poetry, instead considering it extemporaneous, sweetened, or mellifluous. I suppose they are right in certain cases, although the majority gather their views merely from vanity and prejudice.

If emotion, feeling and intellect, the three pillars of lyricism, are consubstantiated in our time through a poetic language with singular validity and full universality, it must be because in this world, where everything is volatile, there is no spring as enduring and effective to uncover all thunder as poetry, to put it with a delicious verse of Lidice Megla.

Precisely the last collection of poems of Lídice, El nombre secreto de la flor/The Secret Name of the Flower published by Abra Cultural Canarias is a model exponent of these airs that come from classicism to oxygenate the somewhat gangrenous atmosphere of our poetic firmament.

With essences of ancient lyrics and even the melic, she imprints a renewed encouragement to the journeys of the poet into the intimate self and the subsequent burden of experiences, emotions, reveries that amaze for a poet of these days, "The flower of being, that mirror that is wall and window”, she tells us.

Between the sick rose and the mystical lily with which William Blake recreated the human sensations of his time, and the recurring flowers of Dulce María Loynaz, summon of the beauty and brevity of life, Lidice Megla keeps existential distance, although not essential, retaking the flower as another mode of woman, destined to germinate, to be born and not to stay for a long time with the view fixed on one place, warning us, that "To say the true secret name of the flower/you would have to perceive its song when emanating from the tap of the universe."

Without carelessness or sweetening (as the suspicious of the lyrical influence might expect), and fully aware that poetic art also implies "knowing oneself to be a shadow of language", Lidice sets her sights on accepting that "dreams must have the thickness of the wind", nor does she seem to be willing to tear her clothes off by some other coincidence with the Blakean idea of the body being but the part of the soul perceived with the senses. And just from such a Levantine attitude she gave rise to these poems written between 2014 and 2022, all worthy collectibles where there are any, and each one of them alike an example of the enduring tradition of lyricism. "That's why in poetry I'm always happy/She uncovers all the thunder. /For her my deep desire to write spans the entire world, /she allows me to gloat in her greatness and my smallness. /Be proportional to the volatile.../and everything is volatile,/except poetry, which uncovers all thunder."

José Hugo Fernández.

Miami, May 2022.