Mery Yolanda Sánchez (Colombia)

Por: Mery Yolanda Sánchez
Traductor: Martha Renza

A Letter

I can give you the last news
tell you how much healing
in the song of war.
I can show you the sharp light
that cuts the midday of the dead,
but I can't talk about the butterfly's
last garment,
nor my need to see you.

Mery Yolanda Sánchez was born in El Guamo, Tolima, Colombia, in 1956. She has published La ciudad que me habita, 1989, Ritual para las noches, 1997 and Dios sobra, estorba. Her poems, short stories, literary comments and book reviews have appeared in different anthologies and magazines of her country, Venezuela and Brazil. She was awarded with The National Scholarship of 1998 from The Ministry of Culture for her project Poetry in staging (Scenic proposal for poet's performance that takes place in Bogota since 1993). She has directed poetry workshops for children, youngsters, prisoners and people that live in the streets. She designed and developed for the Human Rights Committee the project Puente Experimento Piloto (theater, dance and literature as liberators from interfamily violence). She directs the Free Association for the Arts "Alartes- entity of artistic and cultural action that makes technical and logistical production for events in auditoriums as well as massive events. In his own words: "I learn from the sound and the noise of these years that have gone through the prolongation of a drop in the transversal axis that has overcrossed my generation: the war. My father took out Little Red Riding Hood from the house, to talk to me loudly about his own news and tell me about the present historic moment. Through tango my mother showed me how much weight and content a word had; and my brothers lost in the decency of teaching never asked me why I didn't want to be a teacher like them, maybe that silence allowed me to break the schemes that were then imposed on traditional families and seek in other essences the window to recognize in my friends how good it is to be. Since the day my brothers painted with charcoal a radio in a pole in the house's backyard and they danced, I knew that I wouldn't have any kind of problems to sustain myself and this country of mine full of confusions and yells of independence in the carnivals of treason became the biggest database for my creative work.