skip to main |
skip to sidebar
In These Times
Happy New Year . . . Today you who have
my land on both sides of you, how happy you are, brother.
I am the wandering child of all that I love.
Answer me, imagine that I am with you,
asking you, imagine that I am with you,
asking you, imagine that I am that January wind,
Puelche wind, ancient wind of the mountains
that when you open the door visits you
entering, airing its swift questions.
Tell me, have you gone into a field of wheat or barley,
is it golden? Speak to me of a day of plums.
Far from Chile I think of a day, circular,
purple, transparent, of sugar in clusters,
and of thick blueberries dripping
into my mouth, their cups filled with delight.
Tell me, did you bite into the pure flank
of a peach today, filling yourself with immortal ambrosia,
until you too became the fountain of the earth,
fruit and fruit arriving in splendor to the world?
———————————
Pablo Neruda
Canto General
song of the Americas
translated by Mariela Griffon
Tupelo Press, 2016
Manuscript Found by Natasha Rostova
During the Fire of Moscow
I will try to live on earth without you.
I will try to live on earth without you.
I will become any object,
I don't care what —
I will be this speeding train.
This smoke
Or a beautiful gay man laughing in the front seat.
The human body is without defense.
It's a piece of firewood.
Ocean water hits it.
Lenin puts it on his official shoulder.
And therefore, in order not to suffer, a human spirit
Lives
Inside the water and inside the wood and inside
the shoulder of a great dictator.
But I will not be water. I will not be a fire.
I will be an eyelash.
A sponge washing the hairs of your neck;
Or a verb, an adjective
I will become. Such a word
Slightly lights your forehead.
What happened? Nothing.
Something visited? Nothing.
What was there you cannot whisper.
No smoke without fire, they whisper.
I will be a handful of smoke
Over this, lost, Moscow.
I will console any man,
I will sleep with any man,
Beneath the army's traveling horse carriages.
— translated by Ilya Kaminsky
———————————————
This Lamentable City
poems by Polina Barskova
Tupelo Press 2010
