My Name Will Be Poet

Photo by Viola Weinberg, Kenwood, CA

POEM TO MY DEATH

—Julia de Burgos, Puerto Rico, 1914-1953

                                              Confronting a longing

To die with my very self, abandoned and alone,

On the densest rock of a deserted island.

At that moment, a final yearning for carnations,

On the landscape, a tragic horizon of stone.

My eyes filled with graves of stars,

My passion spread out, exhausted, dispersed,

My fingers like children watching a cloud fade,

My reason mobbed with enormous sheets.

My pale affections returning to silence

—Even love, consumed brother in my path!—

My name untangling, yellow in the branches,

And my hands, twitching to give me to the grass.

To rise to the final, the whole minute,

And to offer myself to the fields,

Then to bend the leaf of my ordinary flesh

And fall unsmiling, without witness to inertia.

Let nobody dishonor my death with sobs
Or wrap me forever in plain earth

For in a moment of freedom I may freely

Demand the one liberty of this planet.

With what mad joy will my bones begin

To see airholes in my brown flesh

And I, giving myself, giving myself fiercely and boldly

To the elements: in solitude breaking my chains!

Who will detain me with useless dreams

When my soul begins to fulfill its task

Making of my sleep a rich dough

For the frail worm that knocks at my door?

Smaller and smaller my worn-out humility

At every instant greater and easier the surrender

Perhaps my chest will turn to begin a flower bud

Maybe my lips will feed lilies.

What shall I be called when all that remains

Is my memory of myself on the rock of the deserted island?
A carnation wedged between my shadow and the wind,

Death's child and mine: My name will be poet. 

(trans. from the Spanish by Grace Schulman)

______________________

—Medusa