El ángel

Al amanecer,
cuando la dureza del día es aún extraña
vuelvo a encontrarte en la precisa línea
desde la que la noche retrocede.
Reconozco tu oscura transparencia,
tu rostro no visible,
el ala o filo con el que he luchado.
Estás o vuelves o reapareces
en el extremo límite, señor
de lo indistinto.
No separes
la sombra de la luz que ella ha engendrado.

José Ángel Valente

Tomorrow I’ld must be attending to the IV Civil Engineering, Territory and Environment Congress at Málaga (South Spain). Finally I couldn’t travel because domestic problems, so I’m a bit sad.

I’m a bit sad because tomorrow morning my first boss J.R. Acinas will present the paper “POPE. Assisting to the port operations system. Experiences in Ferrol Outward Port”. It shows the first professional work in wich I’ve got involved. We developed in the Ports and Coast Lab of my Civil Engineering School a system that helped to take decissions about operations in the port based in 48/72 hours weather forecast. The program takes wave and wind forecast in great scales and it calculates wave, tide and currents in a thinner grid. And, of course, it was developed with very interesting pieces of free software like Delft University of Technology’ SWAN (Simulating WAves Nearshore), on top of a (Debian) GNU/Linux system.

We finished the works some years ago, but I’m still very fond of it And I’ll be always grateful with Dr. Engineer Javier Eiras because the great work he did and the assistance he made me when he left the team.

When I was a teenager I had a controversy with my friends and our the Biology teacher. They said once the paper is destroyed, writtings are missed forever. Meanwhile, I defended even when the paper rots or burns, poetry will survive ever because it’s written on our souls.

Today I finished to read civil engineer José Antonio Fernandez Ordóñez‘ speech in his joining to the Fine Arts Academy of San Fernando. He finished with this paragraph:

“…don’t deceive ourselves, only the work of poets is really everlasting. When there’ll only be ruins of the most beautiful bridges in the world, Mozart’s music will remain so wonderful and new like the first day of its conception…”

So now I think I won that debate