María Baranda (Mexico)

Por: María Baranda
Traductor: Alicia Knight

Dylan and the Whales

a hole oferrands and shades
Dylan Thomas

1.

What sounds are those, Dylan, that are heard
from the pale forest
of your drenched mouth?

What potent fruit nourishes
you in your city
of empty time?

What stone dares shout for you
from that Herodes of straw and salt
which stirred your blood?

What saint about to fall
collapses now between warm veins
that tear open your wound?
Altar wise
by owl- light,
my imagined life goes on
by the power of someone death,
precarious prince at the sky's edges,
who permits me to speak at the fire of war,
to tell my shadow in the alchemy of water
where to name a light is to picture the night,
to open a chalice at dawn's intention.

Here the dead hold sway,
where someone, maybe a god,
slave of rain,
a melancholy ruler of what was,
avidly opens the silence of blood
in the night's vertigo and its fear
so that he might say what is, what burns endlessly
in the cups of dust that drizzle his thirst into vacuity.

This is the hour when I may know
what was torn from my history,
the fragment chiseled over a cold suicidal night.

María Baranda was born in Mexico City, Mexico, in 1962. Poet, publisher and translator. She has written the poetry books: El jardín de los encantamientos, 1989; Fábula de los perdidos, 1990; Ficción de cielo, 1995; Los memoriosos, 1995; Moradas imposibles, 1997; Nadie, los ojos, 1999; Causas y azares, in collaboration with painter Magali Lara, 2000; Narrar, 2001; Atlántica y El Rústico, 2002; and Dylan y las ballenas, 2003. Her poetry has been translated into French, English and Lithuanian. She has obtained the prizes: Ibero-American Poetry Prize granted by the Villa of Madrid, Spain, 1998, I National Poetry Award of Aguascalientes, 2003.