Inkamisana

 

Stairs & rites

not for the foot

 

The building

thinks

 

Angular rock

 

Green skyscraper

 

Black ziggurat

 

Miniature

of time

 

Made

into altar

 

Invention

of the night

 

Sprouting

at dawn

 

Carved rock

praying

as it buds

 

Seeking the seed

to sprout!

 

Saliva

in torrents

 

Cooling waterfall

 

You redeem your field

 

Salt head

 

Stream

of lights

 

Double reflection

 

Stone

& water

 

The same

sprouting

 

Cecilia Vicuna, Unraveling Words & the Weaving of Water (Graywolf Press, 1992)

 

 

La Extranjera

She speaks in her way of her savage seas
With unknown algae and unknown sands;
She prays to a formless, weightless God,
Aged, as if dying.
In our garden now so strange,
She has planted cactus and alien grass.
The desert zephyr fills her with its breath
And she has loved with a fierce, white passion
She never speaks of, for if she were to tell
It would be like the face of unknown stars.
Among us she may live for eighty years,
Yet always as if newly come,
Speaking a tongue that plants and whines
Only by tiny creatures understood.
And she will die here in our midst
One night of utmost suffering,
With only her fate as a pillow,
And death, silent and strange.

The Stranger
Gabriela Mistral

I Invent You

I invent you in the garden
I invent that you talk to me
that you call me
and in fact you do talk to me
and sometimes I don't understand
what you say
and I am amazed at you
at your mystery
and I pretend that I understand
so that you won't go away.
Day after day I invent you
and that's my way
of confronting your absence
because if I don't invent you
the joy of my hours
would vanish
and you as well.

Claribel Alegria
translated by Carolyn Forche