Milton Peralta
EL RÍO
Te fuiste en lágrimas
y volviste por el mismo río.
El puerto era una alegría de brazos,
la luna vivía en tu boca.
La espera no tenía tiempo
y la suave onda en tu orilla mecía
a mi musa en su sueño.
Pero el amor no era una barca sin verbos.
Pero el amor no era, en realidad, una barca.
Era, más bien, el rescate y la corriente,
la voz que se apresura en la madrugada,
la mano que sobresale en el naufragio.
EN UN MUNDO DESHABITADO
salimos a encontrarnos entre los ojos
cuando amarillento de los árboles
el odio caía
inútil
como un homicida
en un mundo deshabitado
Valeria Varas
Una obra teatral adaptada al radioteatro con actores exiliados en Oslo, Noruega.
Ramón García
An Early Epitaph
A corrupt world can keep its ambition.
For others glory, admiring attention,
The adoration of strangers.
I practiced the art of friendship,
And a few decent people cared deeply for me.
Say I knew love, for a very short time,
But I pity those who knew less
For much longer, for their whole lives.
I went here and there, without guide or destination,
Because I had to escape
The sirens of a loving home
The soothing ones, whose song was comforting,
But murderously stifling.
Say I was Odysseus, but also Penelope,
That while I was wandering, I was also waiting.
That exile became my condition,
That there was no other way to live
In an Ithaca destroyed before I was born.
Pat Davis
Meditation in Quepos
Looks like a cancer on the leaf is the way a man in our group describes the frog. Asleep, it has covered or tucked its colors underneath: orange feet, electric blue sides.
More to the point, it’s the thing on the leaf that looks like a leaf.
*
Did you ever notice, wonders my daughter who’s twelve, how there’s a little distance
between ourselves and our reflection? She’s touching a mirror. The glass is just the glass
for a fingernail’s width before our image blooms out.
*
The tree frog’s only defense is its eyes.
When it hears a predator, it bears the suspense, tolerates
it blind, then opens them, enormous, red, iridescent.
No one wants to swallow those eyes.
*
Rocks, coins, seashells— these were placed on the eyes of the dead to keep them shut—
the only part of our body that reflects. For this same reason the mirrors were covered.
*
That alligator the one at Disney who snapped its jaws on the head of a two-year-old boy who was shoveling sand into a bucket, planning to make a castle on the shore of a lagoon, that alligator should have been blinded. The boy’s father wrestled with the snout. He should have jabbed his thumb in its eye.
No one thinks of that in the moment. They pick the jaws, the losing battle, mesmerized by what holds the child.
*
On the gray packed sand of the first Pacific beach my daughter and I have walked is a sheet of water that never recedes, that somehow escapes ebb and flow. It makes a canvas for an oil painting, a Goya. Everything is reflected. Go, I tell her, next to that cloud. Stand in that patch of sky.
*
Alligators have invaded the Disney resort, as well as golf courses and the yards of mansions. Development means unfolding. And what is let out of the envelope? As we pave our fantasy of life everlasting on the wilderness death comes closer. It has nowhere else to go.
*
Stephen Hawkings thought we could colonize space with robots. Machines could replace DNA-based life. There would be no birth, of course, no new cry, no life emerging from that hole where pain
and pleasure made their peace. He was ok with that—he whom death had tormented for decades, taking him at its leisure. Maybe it’s better though, to let death lie, folded, asleep against or inside us. To let it bloom like the sky at our feet. Yes, our days are numbered. At the moment that makes me love them, since for each I pay with my life.