Mario Bojorquez – Award

As the last day does not return You’ll never be that high voice Tundía under the breath of infinite almonds A lullaby to his chest You will not have to be that That shade of a poplar Rent the air with scattered notes The subtle scent of an afternoon on the river There will be no day you return to your expense Filled with memories of the dark obsequious Solar excessive idleness Cerns perfect As the last day does not return You never on your own steps A walking path open for you In the garden that keeps your memory Not even in deserted Frond you will have to tread To you because transit between fig fruit Pomegranates, flowers at your feet You’re just now that you did not want You’re the one who did not know what he wanted to say Greedy mouth no fruit chews That spoiled, bitch, feast and festival You’re the insaciado looking with envy The overwhelming joy of others Whoever hurts to the bone for the innocent laughter It will cloud your eyes with anger It will swell cruel hands remorse It poisons your blood What fire, what abandonment How miserable are the shores of life As the last day does not return No back in you will concoct bells Holidays in flowered fields Neither your hands browned wheat of eras Nor whiten your snow on your mill As if you had closed universe In a thick fog that prevents you Learn what the rock crevice That must be the source where you drink As if the universe against you Injected into the air that poison Bending your knees So as the day turns A spin on its hinges hours and passes And overhead the sun will go down Lost to So you lose So as you lose you lose The scent in the air that always blows hard You’ll miss so terribly That to your eyes can recognize your own skin Neither your ears hear your voice As if talking on another that you Not even your blood It will respond pálpito And the tongue utter A language that is unknown to you today. Do not grieve Hurt to lose. You call Bitter, in your gums It will bloom a garden of tree-scale And in your head start seborrhea high tufts Niagara mist in your eyes You call without reproach wounded The living skin ulcer land where you step Without faith you call And there will be another you Built in penalty That round will infect Leprosy is righteous It must distinguish in the market The mob cried He will announce you arrive The stench of your acids The clear bell is anticipated And you wondered why back Why and what And what return If the return would smell bouquets awaiting your step If yes minor fronds fruit curds, cheerful blooms, light concrete and acid, And back with an army of sources nymphs dancing for you If I go back in the water, ductile, light, fluent, if in the air If you awaken in the back you are, if you come back spin, spinning, start from yourself If you become, if you founded back, come back without hesitation Although recent days should not happen again

Léopold Sédar Senghor – Elegy Of Midnight

 

Summer, splendid Summer, nourishing the Poet on the milk of your light
I who grew up like the wheat of spring, which made me drunk
From green water, from the green steaming in the gold of Time
Ah! no longer can I tolerate the midnight light.
The splendor of such honors resembles a Sahara,
An immense void, with neither erg nor rocky plateau,
With no grass, no twinkling eye, no beating heart.
Twenty-four hours a day like this, and my eyes are wide open
Like Father Cloarec’s, crucified on a boulder by the Joal pagans
Who worshipped snakes. In my eyes the Portuguese lighthouse
Turns round and round, twenty-four hours a day,
A precise and restless mechanism, until the end of time.

I jumped out of bed, a leopard about to be snared,
A sudden gust of Simoom filling my throat with sand.
Ah! if I could just collapse in the dung and blood, in the void.
I turn around among my books watchilng me with their deep eyes
Six thousand lamps burning twenty-four hours a day.
I stand up lucid, strangely lucid. And I am handsome,
Like the one-hundred-runner, like the rutting black stallion
From Mauritania. I carry in my blood a river of seeds
That can fertilize all the plains of Byzantium
And the hills, the austere hills.
I am the Lover and the locomotive with a well-oiled piston.

Her sweet strawberry lips, her thick stone body,
Her secret softness ripe for the catch, her body
A deep field open to the black sower.
The Spirit germinates under the groin, in the matrix of desire
The sex is one antenna mong many where flashing messages are exchanged.
Love music no longer can cool me down, nor the holy rhythm of poetry.
Against this despair, Lord, I need all my strength
—A soft dagger in the heart as deep as remorse.
I am not sure of dying. If that was Hell: the lack of sleep
This desert of the Poet, this pain of living, this dying
From not being able to die, the agony of shadows, this passion
For death and light like moths on hurricane lamps at night,
In the horrible rotting of virgin forests.

Lord of light and shadows,
You, Lord of the Cosmos, let me rest in Joal-of-the-Shades,
Let me be born again in the Childhood Kingdom full of dreams,
Let me be the shepherd of my shepherdess on the Dyilôr tanns
Where dead men flower, let me burst out applauding
When Téning-Ndyaré and Tyagoum-Ndyaré enter the circle
And let me dance like the Athlete to the drum of this year’s Dead.
This is only a prayer. You known my peasant’s patience.
Peace will come, the Angel of dawn will come, the singing of birds
Never heard before will come, the light of dawn will come.
I will sleep at dawn, my pink doll in my arms,
My green- and gold-eyed doll with a voice so marvelous,
It is the very tongue of poetry.

—Translated from the French by Melvin Dixon

(from Nocturnes, 1961)

on notable sea

tone dialing remedy

better than those gulls

filling the air with

pull of sea,

encroaching on ears

cochlea tremors

insistent and provocative,

life needed to be in boxes

without labels,

identifying was not the issue

it was separation,

the telephone a child

cradled under chin

suckling on words,

spectacles perched with vertigo

on top of a crooked nose,

lips always poised

to speak but that was of

no consequence as sound

could carry further than voice,

a scream long prolonged

that was what pain brought,

gulls worse than cicadas

blood curled into fingers

then returned leaving them white

and grasping

still nothing,

slit your veins and fill a boat

with a swilling legacy

of something that

should of been,

letting gulls fall

bathing feathers redder

dVersePoets