The journey has been very long, very hard. Like every year, and despite being perfectly designed to fly thousands of kilometers, the last part of the journey has been costly: finally leaving the African continent behind and facing the Atlantic towards the islands, flapping incessantly, with the breeze stuck to the feathers. Only from the blind faith of instinct, from the eternal call of procreation, does he obtain the last forces.
Finally, a faint smell of tabaiba, of humid malpaís, returns him to the longed-for vision: Lanzarote. Quickly, he ascends through the Temisa ravine and stops at the Chafariz springs. It is the well-deserved rest: the bath, an ancestral rite; removing from each feather the heavy amalgam of desert dust and saltpeter.
Tomorrow is the big day. Dawn breaks over the Haría palm grove. Several kestrels move away, wary of his passage. The diaspora, with its vigor of worlds, always punctual. He climbs happily through the Elvira ravine. Little by little, he accelerates his flight, now smooth, brilliant. He passes the last acacias of the Bosquecillo, skims the ground and, suddenly, faces them. There they are: the void, the Islotes.
From low flight he goes, in an instant, to being suspended in space filled only with Famara wind. Total landscape. Nature. The day cleared to receive the falcon in blue. Below, La Graciosa yellows, beaten by foam. Its seduction is so powerful that in a terrifying dive he lets himself fall, crossing guinchos, pirates, conquerors, mahos, chinchorros... times. At breakneck speed he verifies that everything is still there, almost the same. Only those strange parallel furrows on the sands that increase every year give him the notion that time has passed, that the island has aged.
He recognizes everything and everyone: bustards, petrels, guinchos, shearwaters, storm petrels, crows, Egyptian vultures... Most are already preparing their nests. He coasts along the north. Playa del Ámbar, always fresh, as if it were the image in a mirror returned from the other shore. He already sees Montaña Clara, the Chapel, as if an explosion of colors burst in his pupils, the island emerges from the sea with the force of the volcano. Other fins are already settling on it, small hollows on the void.
He continues his flight without stopping. He is a daughter of Alegranza. His home is the Caldera, the most monumental and perfect of the Canary craters. Its red beaches incite, wild, the blood. Nuptial flutters over the old and solitary lighthouse. Copulating in the ecstasy of the perfect, turning life around, refreshing it, licking it on that always magical scenario of sea, of sea, sea of lava, cliffs, beaches, puddles and calderas: the falcon's nest. Silence!
[October 1994]
