9 LGBT Poets To Know And Love

From: NewNowNext

4. 

Reinaldo Arenas 

(1943-1990)

Born and schooled in Cuba, the life of queer poet Reinaldo Arenas was a life marked by tragedy. In the 60s, as he served as editor and journalist for a slew of literary magazines in Havana, his openly gay lifestyle ran in direct opposition to the Communist regime of the country, resulting in his imprisonment in 1974 for “ideological deviation.”

He was placed in the notorious El Morro Castle alongside violent rapists and murderers, where he managed to survive by helping inmates write love letters home.

Once he escaped to the United States in 1980, he wrote prolifically of his experiences in Cuba, producing poetry that was raw and largely autobiographical. Arenas contracted AIDS in 1987 and eventually committed suicide in 1990.

From “As Long as the Sky Whirls: For Lázaro Gómez”:

As long as the sky whirls

You will be my redemption and my doom,

magnetic vision,

lily in underwear,

salvation and madness

every night waiting.

As long as the sky whirls

no infernal could be a stranger

because I have to take care that that would not harm you,

No joy would go by inadvertent

Because in some way I have to reveal it to you,

As long as

the sky

whirls

you will be the truth of myself,

the song and the venom,

the danger and the ecstasies,

the vigil and the sleep,

the dread and the miracle.

As long as the sky whirls . . . but perhaps the sky whirls?

Well: as long as the sky exists.