IN COLOMBIA IT DOESN’T SNOW AT ALL

ICE is the coldest alphabet ever carried across a border—If 

No mountain in my country has prepared us for this temperature, nor could I. 

Colombia has no winter, only heat and hearts that refuses to kneel—Only if I knew 

Our dead turn into mariposas amarillas against the smoke. Could it be that 

Learning early “love is louder” is what makes us? Even when I refuse to believe it today, 

Otherwise silence would swallow whole neighborhoods. It must be hard deciding who would 

Matter enough to remain, who is permitted to be 

Body instead of paperwork beneath the 

Invisible doctrine of someone else’s last 

Authority. Over breath and borrowed time. 

In kitchens where coffee thickens like memory, we hold each other as if I’d 

Turn and find the room emptied, no one left to see 

Documentless names bent out of shape by foreign tongues— you, 

Ocean-hearted child of coffee mountains, I 

Enter each winter carrying a country that would 

Soften, I dare to say dissolve, the word exile into an abrazo instead of a hug. 

Nurtured in heat, in gold afternoons that refuse to release you. 

’This is how the cold begins (not with snow but with ICE), tight. 

Three letters lower the sun inside a room and 

Silence behaves like law. They are asking mothers to pray 

Not for mercy but for endurance beneath the 

Official voice that speaks as if it were the Lord.

When it is only weather trained to be 

A century of rain. However, nothing could repair the 

Tear in the chest where belonging becomes the keeper. 

And not even Cien años de soledad can undo the arithmetic of 

Leaving, of Cartagena’s salt and Bogotá’s thin air pressed into your 

Laughter—so smile: the only homeland no one can deport, the unextinguished soul.