Julia de Burgos was a celebrated Puerto Rican poet whose work remains deeply influential for its emotional intensity and bold themes of identity, freedom, and feminism. Writing during the early 20th century, she used poetry as a way to challenge social norms and express her inner struggles as a woman and a citizen of a colonized nation.
One of her most famous poems, “A Julia de Burgos,” presents a powerful dialogue between her true self and the version of herself shaped by society. Through this poem, she rejects traditional expectations and embraces independence and authenticity. Another well-known poem, “Río Grande de Loíza,” reflects her deep connection to Puerto Rico, using the river as a symbol of both cultural pride and pain.
Her poetry often blends personal emotion with political awareness, making her voice both intimate and revolutionary. She wrote about love, inequality, and the search for self with honesty and lyrical beauty. Although her life was short, her work continues to inspire readers around the world, especially those interested in feminist and socially conscious literature.
Farewell from Welfare Island
It has to come from here,
right this instance,
my cry into the world.
The past is only a shadow emerging from
nowhere.
Life was somewhere forgotten
and sought refuge in depths of tears
and sorrows;
over this vast empire of solitude and darkness.
Where is the voice of freedom,
freedom to laugh,
to move
without the heavy phantom of despair?
Where is the form of beauty
unshaken in its veil, simple and pure?
Where is the warmth of heaven
pouring its dreams of love in broken
spirits?
It has to be from here,
right this instance,
my cry into the world.
My cry that is no more mine,
but hers and his forever,
the comrades of my silence,
Poem for Tears
As when my eyelids were opened by your dreams,
broken and weary, welcomes my departure.
As if you had me swimming in your arms,
where the waters run mad and lost.
Just like when you loved my useless daydreams,
passionately, bid me farewell on the shore...
I'm leaving as my birds came to your flights,
quietly and meekly, to rest wounds.
Nothing else stops my eyes in the cloud...
They rose to raise you, and what an immense fall!
Corpses of stars jump on my chest
that by rivers and mountains I stole you, tender.
Everything was my universe, some waves flying,
and my soul a candle guiding your life...
Everything was a sea of foam on my naive horizon...
For your life was everything, a hidden doubt.
And to know that my dreams never left alone
through the blue meadows to paint daisies!
And to feel that I had no other voice than his spirit!
And to think that I never smiled without her laughter!
Nothing more! In my fingers the birds commit suicide,
and my tired steps no longer grow spikes.
I'm leaving as my heavens came to your roof...
fatally and quietly, to fall asleep...
Like the warm rest of the simplest twilight,
naturally tragic, masterfully wounded.
Bye. Pray verses to me on very long nights..
In my chest without fire there is no room for life...
the phantoms of my grave.
It has to be from here,
forgotten but unshaken,
among comrades of silence
deep into Welfare Island
my farewell to the world.
I Was the Most Quiet
I was the most quiet,
Among those who voyaged to your harbor.
No obscene social events announced me,
Nor the hushed bells of ancestral reflexes;
My route was the wild music of birds
Which flung into the air my kindness...fluttering.
Neither did vessels laden with opulence bear me,
Nor oriental rugs support my body;
Over the vessels my face appeared
Whistling in the wind's aimless simplicity.
I did not measure the harmony of trivial ambitions
Offered by your full-of-promises hand.
I perceived, only, in the depths of my frail spirit,
The tragic abandon hidden in your gesture.
Your constant duality was marked by my avid thirst.
You were like the sea, resonant and discreet.
Over you I spent my wasted hours.
You hovered above, as the sun on petals.
I Myself Was My Route
I wanted to be as men wanted
that I was: an attempt at life;
a game of hide-and-seek with myself.
But I was made of presents,
and my feet, flat on the promising land
they couldn't resist walking backwards,
And they kept going, going,
mocking the ashes
to reach the kiss of the new paths.
At every step forward on my way to the front
the desperate flapping of wings tore my back
of the old logs.
But the branch was broken forever,
and with each new lash my gaze grew further apart
and more and more of the distant horizons learned:
and my face was taking the expression that came
from within, the defined expression that appeared
a feeling of intimate liberation;
a feeling that arose from the sustained balance
between my life and the truth of the kiss of the new paths.
Already defined my course in the present,
I felt myself sprout from all the soils of the earth,
of soils without history, of soils without a future,
from the ground always ground without edges
of all men and of all times.
And I was all in me as life was in me...
I want to be as men wanted me to be:
an attempt at life; a game of hide-and-seek with myself.
But I was made of presents;
when the heralds announced me
in the royal parade of old trunks, my
desire to follow men,
and the tribute was waiting for me.
I love you
I love you... and you move me the time of my life without hours.
I love you in the pale streams that travel in the night,
and it never stops driving stars to the sea.
I love you on that morning detached from the flight of the centuries that your ship fled
white until the water without ripples where they swam sad, your voice and my song.
I love you in pain without crying that night
has collected the dream in the sky invested in my pupils
to look at you cosmic, in the voice undermined by my noise of
centuries collapsing
I love you (white night cry) in reflective insomnia
from where my spirit has returned in birds.
I love you... My love escapes lightly from expressions and routes, and is breaking
shadows and reaching your image from the point
innocent where I am grass and trill.
Eternal Appointment Poem
Our souls know
beyond the islands and beyond the sun.
The tropics, in sandals of light, lend my wings,
and your dream and my dream came on.
The appointment to the sea was made... tune of my islands,
and there was mourning of lilies stretching hills,
and there was crying of streams driving mad breezes,
and there was a fury of stars revealing wounds...
You, and my voice from the cliffs, fought my life.
Your victory was made to the sea, over defeated palms...
It was landscape in the immense,
an image of sea almost stream,
of river returning,
of life, so deep, atomizing.
And the emotion was given eternal appointment.
The sea, the true sea,
almost mine... the sea, the strange sea
in his own compound...
the sea
He already wants to be the supermarine sea...
The sea, entertaining tune of my islands,
for bringing a flower from the mountain,
he brought my song in an oversight,
my simplest song
the song of my extended dreams.
On the sea, on time,
the tune, the candle...
The eternal appointment, beloved,
beyond the faces of the dreaming islands.
In the chest of the wind the lilies are saying,
that in the chest of the sea two auroras kiss each other.
Rio Grande de Loiza
Rio Grande de Loíza!... Stretch out in my spirit
and let my soul get lost in your streams,
to find the source that stole from you as a child
and in a mad rush he returned you to the path.
Wrap around my lips and let me drink you
to feel you mine for a brief moment,
and hide from the world, and in yourself hide,
and hear voices of astonishment, in the mouth of the wind.
Get off the back of the earth for a moment,
and seek the intimate secret of my cravings;
confuse me in the flight of my fantasy bird,
and leave me a rose of water in my dreams.
Rio Grande de Loíza! My spring, my river,
since the maternal petal rose to the world;
with you they came down from the rough slopes
to look for new grooves, my pale yearnings;
and my childhood was a whole poem in the river,
and a river in the poem of my first dreams.
