Perú (National Prize for Poetry),USA
Visiting the relatives
Picking up my cafe au lait
I rather taste some
afternoon
when you poured into my memory
among the orange trees.
You were young, we were kids.
Your sister the artist, arranged
the outdoors
with the strangest fruits.
I feel her lonely fingers
and the shining A in filigree.
You all loved Segovia, Zabaleta,
Trotsky, Rivera,
` and Frida,
Guayasamín, everybody -
even your revolutionary lovers,
who
owned you their lives.
You catered as 5:00. I was seduced
by the general beauty.
In silence I felt this poem
forming in my heart.
I fiercely tried to keep the feeling
of those shadowed eyes,
knowing that some day
you would come back
for this moment of your life
like today,
when your picture
looks at me like then,
under the cool air of the mines,
smiling tender and familial
with all my dead relatives in Perú .
Stigmata
Against
the sky, against the wall,
somebody has broken my legs, somebody is
in the isolated roads, beware. It happens fast.
Beneath Greco skies alarms go off
in the Gates of Hell.
My senile psychopath teacher
bending on the books
lies open, knowing nothing
but the history of the paving stones.
Wouldn't be possible to hide
in these muddy streets
so the flowers will go wild?
A voice is just asking something
when the sirens go off, the fire bellowing
high.
Run, run. Let me into the burning fire
of my fatherland. Bastards like leaves
are trembling, since your
mother died.
When is fall coming? It is only winter here.
Where would we all go?
I'll tell you someday where I'm going.
Remember. The bastards on the avant garde,
the rear garde,
shooting at our flanks.
What can one person do?
Break-in growing tall,
quivering, getting away,
crying? I wish I could help.
Stigmata in the body of my land,
running down my final tears. Father, do not cry.
We have no heart to. Don't.
Piece for Man and Woman
Delirious interpretations of the rose,
grow in a text. A song of virtues,
a song of vices. Centaure Phallique
shines against black.
His arrow spelling polymorphic dances.
Melting lacquer in the wind,
spirits of the paper, the breasts of mountains -
calling, yearning for the sea.
Life Death is in human nature,
all the rivers empty in la mar.
Pieces of aural silence,
portraits of angels go around
opening and closing a book
perforated by a blue monochrome.
Life and Death
surviving in the pages.
From
the book "Mother Blood"
© Cecila Bustamante
