as blahaj.zone and lemmy.blahaj.zone run on different servers, and both were unreachable at the time of my op, i really meant dead, not down

from the article:

From the Popol Vuh, or National Quiché History

[Excerpt from Part II]

“Brother, the bats have stopped moving. It looks like the sun has begun to rise,” said Ixbalanqué to Hunahpú.

“Perhaps. I am not sure,” answered Hunahpú, “Let me look…”

And when Hunapú stuck out his head, to see if dawn was breaking, Camazotz cut it off at the neck with a single blow.

“Hunahpú, is it morning yet?” Ixbalanqué asked. And when his brother did not reply, he yelled out, “Hunahpú! Where are you?”

Then Ixbalanqué understood the silence. […]

from the article:

I, Who Am Ignorant

I, who am ignorant Need to know If white is virtue true So I can go and bleach my skin

Asks this question, a loyal man Because he needs to know If the black man should not be baptized In the baptismal font

If there is yet another more pure

Going forward, going back Prettier, shinier Where the white man is dipped Will someone tell it straight For I, who am ignorant

Two men and one woman From whom we all descend While only the black man With disdain ought to be faced

The same blood it must be Though the black man alone Is placed forever Separate

If the black man is not baptized I need to know Black was St. Benedictine Black his paintings too And in the Holy Scripture I have never seen a single word writ in white ink

Black were the nails driven through the Christ’s hands Died, he, upon the holy cross Is it possible then, that down he came Not to suffer for the white man’s sins Only this way will I know If the color white is virtue true

When we have to account To my God for every deed How will the black man atone For the white man’s sins

If the black man is then found Without a crime for which to pay Will they say that it’s not true That the white man has no sentence That it’s all been misconstrued So that then I may go and bleach my skin

from the article:

Every time…

Every time I lift my foot, every time I lift my hand, I shake my tail. I listen to your voice come from very far. I am almost asleep: I look for a fallen tree to crawl inside, and sleep. My skin, my foot, my hand, my ears are scratched.

from the article:

Return to the Countryside

Women pounded the grain for a vegetable stew

night was imminent they had to hurry because lanterns were forbidden

when the gong called for dinner the soldiers did not share the meal with the peasants

the next morning half of them had denounced their parents the other half wore posters on their bodies condemned to certain death

the order was to climb the mountain to live up in the heights among the lowliest but the sky answered with floods

so they returned to the cities looking for carrion

that was my army ravenous crows

Rationing

In the line a woman shouts there’s flour

I think of warm biscuits

Soon I hear only rice is left but my happiness is futile

They’re bringing sugar Oh! miracle I will wait I hear words ricochet the sugar is gone

The line begins to disperse

I persist eventually they will bring something finally a hand offers me a chicken I leave with my treasure

In a bookstore nearby a friend has the nerve to read me a long poem the poet doesn’t know why I flee such an ordinary goodbye fills me with guilt

You must live in a country with hunger to understand how a poem’s symmetry can be broken by the slow drip of guts and blood

from the article:

Like Coal

And then you were born, girl with eyes so black. Black as the coal your father burns, like your mother’s skillet, like the burnt underside of her comal.

Like the eye of the well shot through by darkness.

from the article:

Retelling of the Flood Caused by the Mapocho River in the City of Santiago de Chile

“On June 16, 1783 the effects of torrential rains caused the river Mapocho in Santiago, Chile to flood its banks. At the time the small community of Carmelite nuns resided in their cloistered convent next to the river. The rains started in May, but became a deluge in early June and by the time of the great flood, it had poured for 209 hours straight. The nuns would have drowned, had it not been for some neighbors who broke a hole in one of the walls, leading twenty-eight women to safety. Sor Tadea de San Joaquín, a nun from the Carmelite Convent of San Rafael, retells their story in a 516-versed romance [ballad], wherein Sor Tadea affirms that it was God’s will that the nuns be saved by the three men (she does not leave out the ironic detail that they had to be sobornados (bribed).”

– Sarah E. Owens, Travels, Natural Disasters, and the Texts of Cloistered Nuns: A Case from Colonial Chile

from the article:

Indigenous Identity

Identity, it is not in my hair It is not in my face Reflecting in the mirror. Identity is not something to see, It has no form, it has no color But delicate like a flower it is Identity lies within the speaking force In the profundity of a look In the singularity of my place Identity is open hands and share Feel the earth’s echoes and Love and peace at heart. Identity is open arms and receive The brotherly affirmation. Identity is Union!

from the article:

The Man

When encircled by a thirst of soul man, a desert traveler, wishes to gather armfuls of laurels, having reached the gates of glory; “Stop right here,” however, he says to the woman… Returning, then, to his march, if he feels himself waver, and lose his valor, “Come, come,” he tells her, “You are my partner in the hours of combat and agony…”

from the article:

Foolish Men

Foolish men, eagerly accusing women without cause, seeing not that from you springs the very same, those very flaws;

If readily you do invite them to happily disdain you, how do you want them well behaved if toward evil you’ll incite them?

[…]

What temper could be stranger? Than that of he who, lacking counsel, fogs the mirror with his breath and then whines at blurred reflection?

[…]

How can she, who for your love longs, keep her wits and keep her center if she who doesn’t is a prude and offends and she who does is a slut and angers?

Though between the anger and the insult by all your liking forged, if there still be one who doesn’t want you, then joyous hour for complaint.

Your lovers hang sorrows on liberty’s wings for, after making them bad, you wish to find them good.

Whom, then, has sinned more in mistaken passion: she who falls to his begging? Or he who, fallen, begs her?

Or who has greater blame, though in any blame you’ll find, she who sins for pay or he who pays to sin?

How are you then startled to find guilt there in your heart? Love them as you make them. Or make them as you wish.

[…]

Now, with all my weapons your arrogance I battle, for in promise and petition you join devil, flesh, and world.

from the article:

Prayer to the Moon

Moon, lead to me a woman to be my wife. Lead her to me, oh moon. Moon, a horse, lead to me also. Moon, lead to me, a tiger.

from the article:

To Live and Die

Smoke and nothingness, the breath of being: Flower, man, and bird die too as love runs to forgetful seas and pleasure flees to a burial of brevity.

Where are yesterday’s lights? All splendors have their dusk, behind liquor hides all bitterness, and everything is rectified by the evil of being born.

Who laughed without first, in pain, moaning pleasure, sweet suffering? Crazy and vain, the passion of feeling!

Vain and crazy, I long for thought! What is it to live? To dream without sleeping. What is it to die? To sleep without dreaming.

from the article:

Neurosis

You do know that the spirit is an abyss and the heart an ocean: That this is how I can carry within me one infinity, and also the other.

My nerve endings, a living harp, hang from the branches of my frame of forest flesh, letting out a whimper as—across the strings— tiptoes the storm.

from the article:

Excerpt from Relaciones, or Anales

Here is the water and the hill, here the altar of jade, Amaquemecan—Chalco in the place of renown in the place that is example, near the fields of reeds, at the edge of the forest, in the nearness of snow, where they say Poyauhtlan,

[…]

in the garden of flowers, in the garden of mists, where lives the white quail, where curls the snake, near the dwelling of tigers, in Tamoanchan, in the place of our beginning, where flowers rise… Here they came to settle the lords Chichimecas, the priests, the princes…

from the article:

Defeated

We can give up.

It matters not to surrender in silence, if the drums of vengeance echo from afar.

Sign of the Times

Nouns, pronouns, articles… prefixes of the quotidian, suffixes of the allowed. Verbs to regulate conduct and adjectives to qualify injustice.

Nouns, pronouns, articles… exact forms, easy to invert.

The letter, occasionally freed, rebels. And adds, but, also divides.

The word is cursed. It is the sign of the times.

from the article:

For Haiti

Oh, my poor island, victim of hopeless hopes, On the other side of the ocean, tempest and wind, I think of your misfortune and hold for you, within my soul, A dream for happier things. All the while they slander you,

Your daughter in the shade of an absent sun From the great sea where a red sky bursts in laughter, Guiding you to the other side of tempest and wind, This memory as deep as the shadow of your verse.

from the article:

We Came to Dream

Thus spoke Tochihuitzin, Thus spoke Coyolchiuhqui: ****Perhaps we left the dream ****we only came to dream, ****it is not true, it is not true, ****that we came to live upon the earth. ****Like a weed is spring ****in our being. ****Our heart bears, makes sprout ****flowers from our flesh. ****Some part their petals, ****then wither. Thus spoke Tochihuitzin.

from the article:

Song of Silence

A carnival passes through me violently. My ears barely digest what was heard in the slow machine shop where words are chewed on. My gums bleed mutely colored thus from pure voraciousness— it’s like death in the wastelands of immense spring.

Beyond the flower of your perfume, there’s the wasp and its rough stinger. My cry of pain and calm, the same one that leaks thickly from my eyes, imitates the voice of the crickets.

Friend, you should learn now that the cricket doesn’t die singing. Never.

Inside it lives a wound without remedy that opens in your womb a cut born from within that rips to shreds the entrails.

In your womb live unfathomable fears. And a cut that bleeds profusely. Every cricket, like me, dies screaming!

Asé

I am a tree with a thick trunk. My root is strong, knotty, originating, tarry like the night.

Blood, the ejé animals to be sacrificed who run warily, the powerful womb of my orixás.

Each of them gives us to eat a potent granule of what I am with a dark faith.

A blot in the writing of the god whose eyes are sweetly blue.

My faith is black, and my soul blackens the earth in the orixá’s bray that escapes from my mouth.

I am a black tree that escapes from the gnarled root. I am a deep river, calm and silty. I am the arrow and its reach before the scream. And also the fire, the salt in the waters, the tempest and the iron inside the arms.

And I still contend in hours of dull sun at the crossroads.

Translator’s note: From the Yoruba word, axé or ase means vital power. As an interjection within the religion of candomblé, asé may mean “May the gods will it to be so.” Lastly, asé may refer to the house of worship in candomblé, populated by a pantheon of nature-based divinities, the orixás.

Tiffany Higgins is a writer and translator. Her books include The Apparition at Fort Bragg (2016), an Iron Horse Literary Review contest winner, and And Aeneas Stares into Her Helmet (2009), which won the Carolina Wren Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review, Ghost Fishing, and elsewhere. She translated Tail of the Whale (Toad Press, 2016) by Brazilian poet Alice Sant’Anna, and she’s currently translating the work of other Brazilian writers, including Itamar Vieira Junior and Lívia Natália. Her article “Brazil’s Munduruku Mark Out Their Territory When the Government Won’t” is forthcoming in Granta’s online magazine.

from the article:

Behind My Voice

Behind my voice —listen, listen— another voice sings.

It comes from behind, from far. It comes from the buried mouths and it sings.

They say they are not dead —listen to them, listen to them— while the voice rises remembers them and sings.

Listen, listen: another voice sings.

They say they live now in your eyes, sustain them with your eyes, with your words.

So that they are not lost. So that they do not fall.

They are not only memory, they are open to life open wide.

Listen, listen: another voice sings.

from the article:

Poison

For my clumsy back, Expanding into the dirt, To my footsteps beneath my footsteps To the breath of touch.

Limits in high relief, outside limits.

The shadow for my shadow, my back.

Stunned by beauty, breathless in the silk In death’s bay.

My eyelashes fall heavy, re-touching The water, the repose Diamond-shaped, like a fractured Christ.