Poetry
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The poem fell like a deafening block of ice. // Sparse-leaved shrubs grow here / and sheep crop // with small shifts forward; // they don’t seem to move, yet advance / across the ground. // I thought... -
Far too high: the sky / suspiciously white. / The day resists itself, the light flees, withdraws, / concealing what it finds. Everything looks / for its pretext in the memory of blood / the knees don’... -
Like those who dance in a swamp / and do not fear sinking there are those who draw an abyss / and do not fear falling / like the seam of life / in the body of death / stitch by stitch, the thre... -
we are the guarantors of houses through which a safety pin runs / we are the one you always lost sight of and they made you look for / we are in the living room on the table where nothing ever lived /... -
One day I placed a rock on top of your name / and I said to myself: I’ll go singing all the way home. / And I sang / like a wild woman on powerful legs / like a wild river I sang. -
if you drew a map of my body / you would find traces of the blast / where dinosaurs pass away / where those who did not love me agonize / look at the long line of people / who would not give their liv... -
To sleep once and for all / I would have to oneirically detach myself / from my dreams. // Every night I try a retraction on myself / and early in the morning I vanish / in front of the mirror. -
You were on me and night fell / On the haystack in the stable / You rustled my breath like a white hanky / And we heard the cows low soooo long / You stayed on me and the hours passed -
You came back in the warm night’s epicenter, / paled by the violence / of your desire. With stealth you were creeping / toward the borders of the bed, / a place where blood performs its miracles. -
Here comes the night / slowly, in grey / by a storm within // rising moon in Cancer / and Mars at the tides / my blood goes / up to the heart / of the smooth and eternal / vigil of insomnia -
You only need to know water a little to realise it’s tired of being a liquid. The proof is that as soon as it has the chance, it turns into ice or vapour. But not even that satisfies it: vapour gets l... -
The military parade has finished. / Now bums stroll the pier, / an alley where no one finds a peaceful death. // This year there were fireworks / and the President read a tear-jerking / and ovation-wo... -
When passion gets strong, so strong / Heaven cocks its trigger / And then we’re done for / My sweet, sweetheart. / It would be better, perhaps, for us… / Oh no, it would be no better for us! / (Excep... -
The real trails low, can’t fly, a peacock’s train. / But butterfly’s a moment made a thing, / so violent in the fluttering of her wing, / a wind which lingers slowly and so vain, // which grows impati... -
You bought your cousin’s / Chevrolet Belair ‘56 / next you had a Pontiac Chief Star ‘55 / two doors / you sold it to your brother / in law because he had just started working / in the public works dep... -
Where is it now, / the box that’s missing / from the inventory we never took? / In the moving truck? In some dark and hidden / corner / of the closet we inspected one last time / and took for bare? -
Look, tombs. / No, they are bodies. / No, they are dead forms of memory. / No, they are tired forms of memory. // Look, epitaphs. / No, they are poems. / No, they are tombstones with familiar names. /... -
Tonight is a nice night to dance to rock.We brought my father, dead, from Santiago,the family wanted to see itself together at last:our mother only ever took orders from the family. -
Don’t die anymore within me, come out from my tongue. I’ve seen them fall bare-chested, Their raised arms, those looks. -
On the desksits a picture of my excised uterus,a mess that says so littleabout its fibers, the properties. -
Bless us, Lord, those who have little time and a bright future. -
If you were cat I would be a mouse If you were arrow I would be a pigeon If you were knife I would be a wounded body -
Queuing up at the bank, customers watch the abyss of a blue sea on a television suspended from the ceiling to relieve themselves of the wait and silence: -
Clear-cut afternoonabundant with solid attempts—trumpet, telegram, shreds of Girondo—reserves sadness among its drupes. -
This is the original text of a bilingual poem in three parts by Venezuelan poet Beverly Pérez Rego. To read its translation, with the Spanish in English and the English in Spanish, completed by Arturo...
