Songs of the Journey
by
Francesca Gargallo
translated by Dana Delibovi
She Plants Her Feet Firmly When She Walks the Earth Kernel and pit, flesh and bone can grow on any soil as long as water runs and elements rise instant by instant. All the earth is sacred to the pilgrim, who cuts her way through the helpless foliage that runs, a trickle of blood, down the gullies of the hill. She walks on feet that sowed her rows of corn. She sings of ordinary life, lasting since the dawn of time. It is magical to walk, to conjure footsteps. When she sees unbitten fruits along the way, she laughs an immortal laugh. She lives on, crossing the Atlantic in an open boat. She jumps continents and trudges the banks of the Orinoco. She clears a trail, scattering its wild grains, and sings her soft music deep in the Amazon-- songs to defend the Puna zones, songs for the mother of the ocelot. She stops the arrow aimed at the border soldier’s gun. No one denies the danger of death in the waters of Brazil, when suspension bridges fall in Venezuela, or where the bandits lurk in the Darién Gap. But still, the fertile survivor grows whole. And there are herbs to cure the fear. |
Hondureña
The feeble whiteness of a page profaned with figures, a notebook opened in the circle of her torch, calculations-- these are her traveling companions, both motive and sign of the long march: five lemons, two loaves of bread, and a can of tuna, the girl’s towel, the boy’s egg, and thirty-six years of debt. Migration is the last hope, and like all hope, an illusion, when your country is a hub for tourists and a home for dictators. The migrant mother talks to me. The fragments of her life resemble the strokes in the notebook of numbers, and these, she says, she must surrender to God-- without a single proof of God’s existence. |
Three Lemons
“Three lemons, three lemons is all I have,” says the boy, and he shows them in his mournful, dirty palm. “I need you to buy three lemons, I need to get five dollars, because my mother is hungry." The boy's logic is perfect: circular but clear, since justice is a contradiction in this world. A whack to the boy’s unfolded fingers; the three lemons roll away. The foreman’s nihilistic laughter echoes in the boy’s uneasy silence. Near the boy’s calloused feet, a beggar without a past picks up the fruits then hands him five dollars. |
Note: These poems have been excerpted from a group of new poems, Liricas del viaje, publication pending.