“Words Written in the Sand by an Innocent” is a confessional text, in this sense one of those that has brought this nuance to Cuban poetry to its most authentic realization. The long poem is divided into ten sections, through which the poet reveals his vital attitude, but in a language that is pure connotation, a lyrical flow that captures his natural harmony, a very characteristic trait within the non-monolithic stylistic community of Orígenes.

In its first section and throughout the text, the poet combines innocence and childhood as states of mind that cannot fully understand their circumstances, in a world given to them and which the poet inhabits without attempting to unravel. From an axiological point of view, he places the value of life per se and the naturalness of being above the depersonalized understanding of reality:

“I don’t know how to write and I’m innocent.
I have never known what writing is for and I am innocent.
I don’t know how to write, my soul knows nothing but being alive.
He comes and goes among men, breathing and existing.
I go back and forth among men and seriously play the role they want:
Ignorant, speaker, astronomer, gardener.”

Death, dream, hallucination, life, converge in the maelstrom of being, supplanting reality, denying, in a certain way, its existence beyond the senses, in a manner of spontaneous solipsism. In the poem, however, particularly in the second section, one appreciates the use of references that reflect the author’s culture, generally pertaining to the classical world, within an atmosphere of timelessness.

The sense of writing as divine dictation is also present in these pages, from the spontaneous community with the creator—perhaps spontaneity largely defines the entire spirit of the poem—in which sin does not exist; man has not yet invented it for his own torment.

Death has the panacea-like value attributed to it by other authors of our tradition, also associated with women; but there is no dichotomy between death and life; they are, in short, part of the same flow toward eternity, works of the god who divided day from night, and parts of the same search, not for knowledge but for the substance of God.

The cliché “life is a dream,” from the work of that title by the Spanish playwright and poet Pedro Calderón de la Barca, is recreated in these pages. Along with this, truth and falsehood lose their antagonism, perhaps due to the relativity of perception, but above all because for the poet all words, and by extension all actions, have meaning in God. This constitutes one of the most authentic poems in the Cuban tradition.