Yaxkin Melchy Ramos

Poems translated by Alice Whitmore (2018)

Dream

If you grow tired, sleep

when you wake, focus

on the deepness of the well-worn

and rest,

watching the stars.

---

The Singing Cloud

¿Why have I gone?

Why have I come here, alone

A, distant star

H, distant star

Y, distant star


Stars that dance, yes

from here you can see the waltz of their celestial bodies


constellation of lights swirling in the current of time

¿Conjunction?

¿Alignment?

Something more, the dancing figure is a dragon, a river, a tree,

these three things in a waterfall.


Our faces grow old

and covered with clouds.


Moss that grows on our heart,

barges left on the sand,

ignored by passing children

crabs, the distant islands

and choirs of a fire somewhere.


Our hands touch

murmuring in the grass

and in the green.


This is the universe

canoes shaped from songs

in a trail of light

that never dies.

---

¿What does a poet do?

He explains the sky with his song

with the song that is born from his blood

eternal movement

his blood is the blood of the rivers

the ideas in his mind

not one false creation

for he is creation itself

touching the light of the leaves

The stars fit in the palm of his hand

as he fits in the palm of his brother’s hand

of his friend’s, companion’s,

lover’s

His word is there to clear

the modern smoke

that clings and nests

in our hearts

The poet’s song blows through

and lifts the dust

and worries the seas

with its moving calm

it makes the stones laugh

the birds brighten

their song, the singing merges rivers

like children who eat from the same fruit

He weaves with his poems

something luminous and fine

that in a moment is diffused

and covers in a solar mist

all the mornings of the world

all the mornings of the new world

He shies away

from the fulgent beauty

of his literary forebears

he leaves the cape of fascination

hanging on a coat stand

and walks naked, unclothed

with the song of his shedding strands

which fall by the way

against the pillow

against the bathroom floor

against the neighbourhood earth

upon the fountainhead he used to visit

like the university

where he spent his time arguing

with too-thick peers

the same university

where he goes in the evenings

to study the limpid mirror of words

(its clarity is deep but unsettling)

He loses strands of hair while he reads

when he sings

when he stops to listen

when he teaches life to his brothers

when he starts to lose these senses

and his eyes and his ears and his other eyes

that still reserve a space for pride

and his nails and his skin

and his bones

He left behind the craving for creation

but his soul continues, clean now

for the rest of eternity.

Then another poet is born:

—…Where the old maestro lived

now there is a tree.