NOTICE
By resolution of the Local Authority
this great zoo was created
for natives and foreigners
and the pride of our nation.
Among the most prized specimens
are the water and wind animals
(as in the case of the hurricane),
also, a real live Aconcagua,
a teenage guitar,
living clouds,
one professor monkey, and another embryonic one.
Fatherland or Death?
THE DIRECTOR
THE CARIBBEAN
In the aquarium of the Great Zoo
the Caribbean slips by.
This animal,
enigmatic and maritime,
has a crest of crystal glass,
a blue back, a green tail,
an underbelly of compact corral,
and the gray fins of a hurricane.
On the aquarium, this inscription:
"Caution: it bites."
GUITAR
They went out hunting for guitars,
underneath the full moon.
And they brought back her:
pale, fine, lithe,
ceaseless mulata eyes,
a waist of open wood.
She's young, just barely flies.
But already she sings
when she hears, in other cages,
the flittering wings of sones and coplas.
His sombersones an d her lonelycoplas.
On her cage is this inscription:
"Caution: she dreams."
THE RIVERS
Here is the serpent's cage.
Coiled up on themselves,
the rivers, the sacred rivers, sleep.
The Mississippi with its Blacks,
the Amazon with its Indians.
They are like the powerful springs
of gigantic trailer trucks.
Laughing, children toss them
little green living islands,
parrot-painted jungles,
manned canoes,
and other rivers.
The great rivers wake up,
uncoil themselves slowly,
gobble down everything, swell, almost bursting,
and then go back to sleep.
HURRICANE
A thoroughbred hurricane,
just arrived in Cuba from the Bahamas.
Raised in Bermuda
but has family in Barbados.
Has been to Puerto Rico.
Ripped out the mainmast of Jamaica by the roots.
Was going to ravage Guadeloupe.
Did ravage Martinique.
Age: two days.
_________________
Nicolas Guillen
The Great Zoo
translated by Aaron Coleman
The University of Chicago Press, 2024
photograph:
Langston Hughes, Michael Koltyov, Ernest Hemingway, Nicolas Guillen in Madrid, 1937
