BLUE LULLABY FOR MY PRINCESS ELLIE

By Salvador Medina Barahona

               Princess:

My friends the Poets say that the world is a better place when children arrive, and that immortality can trap us in the simple form of a poem, allowing us to make it through the night. I’ve no doubt the world has become a better world since you came along. I write this little music for your eyes. Hopefully, it shall help you cross over to the future! (Little Ellie: I know more about the dark than I do about blue chants; but there are always mysterious twists in words and my words, you see, are now a blue horizon.) For you, Ellie, Ellie! These words for you, written long before you know how to pronounce my name. For you, from the depths of me, this lullaby composed with these words and that waits until your eyes grow, so they can traverse it with their open tenderness and they can listen with their gaze to the music that turns it into a sea. This lullaby, written for you before and beyond time, in the glow of your blue magic of girlhood, on the momentum of a red wave the size of the sun, you will know that this song is yours, and only yours, and how much we have loved you. Ellie, Ellie, Ellie! You will dare to dream by the hands of those who already dream of you. Because Dreaming and Being is your mission, you lovely doll of Light, who in her brightness, pierces the vastest firmament of our nights. Dreaming and running in gardens, around lakes, through the air, up and down the hills. Freely. Triumphantly. Beautifully dreaming and running, Ellie!, through the currents of the sea and the paths of the stars, the darkened fields and cities. Running and dreaming until you go astray, deeply astray, beautiful Ellie, in the highest realms of our hearts.

(To you, Ellie Barahona Ross, with all my love, from uncle Salva)

Translated from the Spanish by

the Panamanian writer and singer/ songwriter

Javier Medina Bernal.

Special thanks for his advice to the Puerto Rican poet  

David Caleb Acevedo.