My Ancestors

       to Alberto Patiño

My ancestors gave me the green voice
and limpid silences that spread
there in the grasslands around Lake Tacarigua.
They travel on horseback around the haciendas.
It's hot. I am the horizon of this landscape
where they are heading.

In the bitter fragrance of the joba trees
I hear the sounds of their harsh guitars
crossing the dust and traversing my blood.
Under my skin they look at each other
so sharply I can almost see their faces.
And when I talk to myself, they are the ones speaking
in the rustling sheaves of the sugar plantations.
It's hot. I am the tense wall
where their portraits hang in a row.

My ancestors come and go through my body,
with the airless breeze sighing from the lake,
the galloping of dark shapes that come down
to be lost among distant seedtimes.
Wherever I go I carry the shape of emptiness
that unites them all in a different space, a different time.
It's hot. It's the green heat that joins them to me.
I am the fields where they are buried.

 

 

Left Behind

Down these streets my funeral has just passed
with its pathetic speeches.
Lightly they lifted my body
among unrecognizable relatives.

As the procession passed
a woman stopped and gazed
with flirtatious embarrassment.
Later I realized she was a shadow
already shouldering centuries under earth.

Above the clouds continued their monologues,
a slow plane barely moved in its flight;
below mourners cough, polite gestures of the crowd,
the usual phrases.

Asleep and with no sense of where I was,
I was going on the last journey.
It was my farewell to this world,
the first time that I was going to die.

Towards the end of the millennium
suddenly I found myself outside of the group,
left behind, contemplating the trees.
The funeral, without me, continued on its course
through the shady half-light of suburban streets.
I walk slowly following it now from far off
down the passage of the years

Original poem copyright © Eugenio Montejo. Translation copyright © Peter Boyle, 2004.