Saturday 29 January 2011

JOSE MANUEL PINTADO - INHERITANCE




Because you began to learn
that love is to blood and fire a war for freedom
for the poem marching among us
leaving fractures & losses on the bed of battle
it would be better to start over.

Our sheets still smell of fresh gunpowder
and thunder trembles in our ears.

That's why I walk the streets
of every city, town, village
the highway crosses
with you always very much within
the magnificent beast we were
leaving behind in this world
now throwing us out of its paradise.
But we also inherit a whole earth
with hoes and seeds
from where wildflowers bloom
to the fragment of world that is ours to share
without fur on the heart
in the middle of a solitary rain.

translated by John Oliver Simon
from Peace or Perish
Acrisis Anthology/Poets for Peace 1983.

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