"Poetry is the union of two words that one never assumed could come together, and that form something like a mystery," said Lorca, who knew something about the subject. To that thought could subscribe without hesitation the Mexican Orlando Mondragón, doctor, surgeon, psychiatrist, and poet.
His passion for the art of healing and his love for letters do not circulate in parallel but are inextricably linked. His verses come out of a delivery room, an operating room, an intensive care unit, the bed where he watches and accompanies the one who is going to die. Through his poems ink and blood flow in equal proportions, pain and love, health and sickness, life and death, salvation and damnation intermingle.
There is rebellion and catharsis, there is power and there is impotence. At 30, the youngest winner of the Loewe Prize with his "Notebooks of Human Pathology", believes that disease "is the only enigma we can aspire to know; the portion of the mystery that we can steal from the greater mystery, which is death." And in those intricacies, outside the books, his poetry is born.
Joaquín Sabina once said that sometimes poetry flees from paper and nests outside the walls, in the street, in silence, on the skin. Mondragón finds her out there, as when he writes: "I tell her: there is no more to do / Just wait / The mother looks at her son's chest / up and down / He has reached that point / Eternity fits between two heartbeats." Or when he describes in "Sutures": "I keep my clothes in a plastic bag. I go outside. I breathe in the cold air. The shadows are coloring on my retina. I think about situations where my hand was useful, where it wasn't. The light discovers a sky saturated with scarlet tones. Red means the worst pain you've ever felt. Follow complete. Red means to be resurrected."
What is a poet? Victor Hugo defined it as, "a world enclosed in one man." A man who sometimes walks with his white ambo and his stethoscope on his back, listening to the pulse of the world, tuteando with life, stealing verses from death.