Perhaps this is the last time you will wake
to witness the moon entering portioned yards
now gone
a light substance
wavers from his body
like an ancient city at night burning
through each window.
As if you were listening to its faint beating
still heavy with love and drink
so light it fills your hand,
and you embrace him like a dear child
who does not understand your embraces
in the mountains without food or sleep
as rain rinses the soil and blood
over his body
his olive-green uniform.
Translated from the Spanish by Charles Tarzian.
Gina María Caruso, poet, teaches at the Packer School and has recently returned from a trip to Nicaragua. She is writing a book on the Nicaraguan youth movement.
“Does my voice not reach you, are you not haunted
by its somber testimony?”
Staging historical justice in Hernán Ronsino’s Glaxo
“A writer worried about reception is cooking a dead book. A writer’s job is to produce the best possible book in absolute freedom, so the category ‘acceptable’ does not play in the process at all.”
Originally published in
Cindy Sherman, Dario Fo, Bruce Weber, Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn, and Raymond Voinquel.
We need our own space to think and digest what we see. And we also have to trust the viewer and trust the power of the object. And the power is in simple things. I like the kind of clarity that that brings to thought. It keeps thought from being opaque.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres
