Boniface Byrne

Bonifacio Byrne (Matanzas, Cuba, March 3, 1861 — Ibid., July 5, 1936) was a Cuban poet. After a youthful period of initiation into modernist poetry, he became, from 1896, the interpreter of the enthusiasms and agonies of his people in the fight for their independence from the Spanish crown.

Biography

He completed his studies in Matanzas. From adolescence he had an inclination for literature. In 1890 he founded the newspapers La Mañana and La Juventud Liberal . He published the first book of verse by him in 1893.

A few years later, in 1896, he had to emigrate to the United States when he published his sonnets on the occasion of the execution of Domingo Mejía. In exile he dedicated himself to separatist work and founded the Revolutionary Club in Tampa, of which he was secretary. During his stay in that Florida city he worked as a reader in tobacco shops and collaborated in Patria , El Porvenir and El Expedicionario .

He returned to Cuba in 1899. During the republican period he was secretary of the Provincial Government of Matanzas and of the Provincial Superintendence of Schools. In 1909 he founded the newspaper El Yucayo . He collaborated in La Primavera , El Ateneo , Diario de Matanzas , El Fígaro and in La Discusión . He was declared Eminent Son of Matanzas in 1915. That same year he moved to New York to restore his failing health. He won poetic awards at the Floral Games of Sancti Spíritus (1916) and Matanzas (1934). He was a founding member of the Index Group (1935). He was a corresponding member of the National Academy of Arts and Letters. He was buried in the San Carlos Borromeo de Matanzas Necropolis in 1936.

A large number of his poetic compositions remained unpublished or grouped into a well-deserved anthology. Raimundo Lazo calls him "the last patriotic poet of colonial times."

Work

Since the publication in 1897 in the American city of Philadelphia of the collection of poems Efigies, made up of patriotic sonnets, this author is considered, due to the great acceptance of this work, as one of the most of the Cuban-Spanish war.

Perhaps his best-known poetry is the one we include here. It was composed by the author upon his return to Cuba after the end of the Spanish-American War, and in it he expresses his anguish in the face of the uncertainty of the national future threatened by a foreign flag (United States), which he could see from the ship in which it entered the bay of Havana, hoisted in the Morro fortress next to the Cuban flag.

My Flag

When I returned from a distant shore,
with my soul mourning and gloomy,
I eagerly looked for my flag
and I have seen another besides mine!

Where is my Cuban flag,
the most beautiful flag that exists?
I saw it from the ship this morning,
and I have not seen a sadder thing...!

With the faith of austere souls,
today I hold with deep energy,
that two flags should not float
where only one is enough: mine!

In the fields that today are an ossuary
she saw the brave fighting together,
and she has been the honorable shroud
of the poor departed warriors.

She looked proud in the fight,
without childish and romantic boasting;
the Cuban who does not believe in her
should be flogged for being a coward!

In the depths of dark prisons
he did not hear the slightest complaint,
and the traces of it in other regions
are signs of light in the snow...

Don't you see it? My flag is the one
that has never been mercenary,
and in which a star shines,
with more light the more lonely.

I brought her from exile in my soul
among so many scattered memories,
and I have known how to pay homage to her
by making her float in my verses.

Although languid and sad she trembles,
my ambition is that the sun, with its light,
illuminates her alone, her alone!
in the plain, in the sea and on the summit.

If shattered into tiny pieces
someday it becomes my flag...
our dead raising their arms
will still know how to defend it!...

Some published works

• 1905: Male at the door
• 1908: The Legacy
• 1915: The Anonymous