I wanted to read the whole story here but my Spanish is zero. I used a tool to do a word-by-word flip of the entire post so I could understand the history of this poet properly. It is much faster than everyone copy-pasting lines into a translator one by one. The literal meaning of the poems and the author's analysis is actually very deep. Dropping the full English version below to save everyone else the manual labor.

Full Literal Translation (Ai Assisted):
30 years have passed since the death of the dear Venezuelan poet Arnaldo Acosta Bello, occurred on April 6, 1996 in Barquisimeto (Edo. Lara), whom I had the honor of knowing in Cumaná, my city, where he lived some years exercising a cultural labor of great importance in the University of the East; to that city he returned from time to time. The last time was in his visit to the Casa Ramos Sucre in the 80s.
Since I read his poetry, I must recognize that his song melancholic and, at the same time, enthusiastic stayed in my heart. About him and his poetry I wrote a post three years ago, which you can read in the following link.
Have been several the homages (articles, chronicles, poetic selections, etc.) rendered to Arnaldo Acosta Bello as a result of his death. Today, reviewing the book from which I will publish two brief poems of his, I found a clipping from El Nacional, where the master artist Pedro León Zapata made him his own tribute in his column “Zapatazos”. I reproduce them to you in a photo I made of that clipping.
I decided this time to choose two poems from his last book, published by Monte Ávila Editores, in November of 1995, some five months before his death: Goodbye to the King. I will make a comment about them at the end.
I must live
In this room alone, without any
voice different to mine,
I see the angel carrying to the moon
a red liquor intoxicates to the crickets
a sawdust dark comes out of their legs.
The withered grass that the summer has left
receives the air toasted of the early morning,
does not want to rot. Like a woman
she lies down, she opens, she clutches the hair,
kisses and bites the lips, the shoulders
of a thirst burning.
It is not the throat dry in front of the lily
full of water, it is the blood that drowns in its swamp
the small life of my eyes, and I must live.
(For Rowena Hill and Nancy Busch)
Nothing
Certain melancholy, certain humor
stirred in the cup of the coffee.
This morning has however
flowers. The colt wild encloses
the neigh in its own nose.
The skin stretches when the rain
or the flies arrive with their feet cold.
Inside of me nothing happens.
I consider that these two small poems of the poet Acosta Bello condense the soul of his poetry, perhaps of his life. We appreciate in “I must live” that spirit melancholic that runs through it in great measure. It is the consciousness of the solitude in front of the image and the happening small of the world. The sensation of the vital making itself metaphor in the elemental, which also is desire corporal, perhaps already absent. The recognition of “a thirst burning” that asks to continue living, almost like a resignation.
No other feeling we find in “Nothing”. In this one perhaps it is more evident. From the experience concrete, is deployed the contrast, because the melancholy is comforted in the flowers. For me the image most surprising and eloquent is the contained in the verses 4 and 5: it seems to read in them that containment that has led to the domain or the moderation necessary for the farewell. The two images following are undoubtedly melancholic. Someone who prepared himself for death? And its verse final, not casually separated from the stanza previous, imposes itself on us as the truth unquestionable of the life solitary.
To finish, I read in his poem of the same book, this phrase poetic that moves: “A small error can approach us to God / more than a dazzling truth”.