In Nahuatl, a language spoken in central Mexico since the 7th century, poetry is designated by a pair of metaphors, Ni Xochitl Ni Kuikatl, “flower, song”. This term describes the poetry as “an ephemeral moment of beauty and truth, symbolized
by the flower and the song. It is an elevation, an outpouring that is expressed. The flower reaches for the sky and the song soars into the air.”
At the heart of this still too little-known literary continent, poetry is not that activity of writing. It unfolds above all through song, and is intimately linked to the surrounding vegetation and flowers. Words and their associations are to be imagined as the poem as a bouquet of words to be sung to the sky.
