THE MARCH OF 150,000,000: CANTO V
in "Spain's Poetry of Conscience", International Poetry Review;
vol 32, North Carolina, 2006)
Row upon row
next to this wire fence of hearts, powerful insolent algae,
ifthe rifle was able to perforate practically the whole conscience
and our children have been falling
as if in a silence of palms
forever reddened. If
until then we raised our studded hands
and all our letters have raised toasts in forgetting's
bankrupt colors
over-spilled with gold and nickel,
rough like strange throats
or snow collar bones. If
we have dreamed of a land that would
take our steps in and ease them with a bit of water,
the divisible water that gives the measure of a man [1]
if the day will come
fateful from wrenched fear,
barely a crack of gunpowder
un-nailing itself here between the eyes.
They too boarded
deep in their dream
terrifíed of spinal and sowing fields
there where the silence
and a rusty snow
crackied silence, the high horses
of the mouth
(deep in dreams),
of the wound.
We have tied the sign of lilies to the beam
left behind
with our mothers, and the lilies
exactly like a kiss,
at the foot of the songs we heard as children
(a man who arrived with soot and olive smears
and who'd plant sunflowers with a word's drawl
riding the evening, for ever now impossible). If
the thighs feel the blow's pain, the edge,
and the March should remain
tamely covered
with the blue curses of our forebears,
and so to roll down our necks like an absurd punishment
the programmed hunger [2]. If someone has already prayed without knowing
he is wounded and forgotten by the cross on the road,
dust cuts, rags of snatched blood, foam with the mouths. If
ash crowns severed limbs,
and millions of deaths. If
cursed earth, if spoils' voices, if braids. If
the still fingers' upturning. If
cracked forearm and collarbone. If
tendons, if caress, slow horse, if rifles.
If rage stuck in the throat in the middle of the dream
and the exhausted infant,
(like three daggers
three unbraided oleanders),
rage stuck in the middle of the open chest,
and the father's scream, and the cloth, and rage, beyond the cloth.
We could have just barely been able then
to leave the captive's house, the house promised
by our fathers' gods, and a house would be
for relaxing our muscles and resting our shoulders on the woman's tears,
and behind the sand fields,
and behind the blackened lands,
and behind the insane rain falls, behind the honeysuckle,
the uncradled grief possessor of dreams.
From the lethargy among us a man escapes...
covered with grain, on my fingers a man who escapes
a man who is I —at last I've said
his name, enrique deer-mouming,
my self sundered from urine,
from sand.
And until we retum,
the linen and the sound of hunting dogs
staking itself on the mineral
rage of old seasons,
until a retum is included [3]
a return with the furrow and the hot mouth
of words curled up on the gums,
and the perforated tooth,
on behalf of what we wanted long ago
and now is wounded shoulder, thigh, tendon,
or breast or lip or collarbone all crushed
and measureless march centered round the tree,
the axed Tree of the Cross,
the ankies of pride,
the mother's gaze,
if the rifle,
At this point
it would be better if you fire.
Let my book of aortas fire at you.
And then let the fiercest among us fall,
may famine's dream be always shared
and affronts repatriated and our rage dismembered,
and the children of the march (powerful, weaned on sand)
be mixed forever in the now impossible dream ofthe fathers,
with the genital hunger of our thighs [4]
with hunger.
[1] "The divisible water that gives the measure of a man" is a verse from Paul Claude's "Second Ode".
[2] "The programmed hunger": The govemment of Niger, as instructed by the IMF and the European Unión, refused to distribute the food among the neediest" (London Observer August 7, 2004) In the spring, the IMF pressured Niger's president, Mamadu Tandja, to implement a 19% value added tax on food. The tax was applied even with a 75% rise in food prices. In June 2005 thousands of persons died of hunger in Niger: during all this time, there was food available, but (because the economic guidelines couid not tolérate "a lowering of market prices") the poor simply did not have the money to face the rising prices (Y ves Engler: Market Famines, 2005).
[3] "Retum": [...] Nvamain Soulé, a young man from Cameroon, 21 years old, on October 2005, after many attempts to reach Europe, was intercepted in Tanger, by the Moroccan police, and was deponed to Oujda, beaten and robbed by the police itself, and finally abandoned in the desert near the border with Algeria with 55 other persons. Forced by the Algerian police to head South on foot, some twenty people died of thirst and hunger in the desert. Mvamain Soulé managed to get to Agadez, with his friend Garba Atiku.
[4] The genital hunger of our thighs: "desire of man's making, man is not hungry; he is hunger." (Hugo Mújica, Argentinian poet, author of Deep Thirst, in an interview, March 2001).
