Poem about a Little Girl Who Owns a City and a River

(Fragments )

Favorite child of mine

now free and yet

not free of my blood;

moss-surface of the breeze;

soft spray to the rains of spring,

coral island rising through my tears

and hours felled by pain...

In this city of my poem there is no gull

nor sea, nor dawn deft and graceful as the greyhound,

no flower, no star of snow and jasmine;

the city of your dream cannot be here in my poem;

instead, here is the tear of some sonless mother,

some suburb full of howling dogs and industry, some

tiny plazas and depths like wounds and oil

and grease-stains of suffering. Here the needled mandibles

of maddened spiders; here hunger and the sonorous mist

sound together like the shriek of gears and armatures,

sound like the shriek of your murdered father in the silence

of the solitary door and lonely window, the birdless garden,

the childless school, the doll sprawled over the rubbish heap,

lying among the worn-out shoe and the 'still-warm china plate.

Here the cold loudspeakers of fear and solemn bells, the cement:

here everything meant for life and met with death but freedom

is not here, nor song, nor river, nor half a wind with its lark-like

heart

and its inner storm; but there is one flower here, though torn in

blood

and fermented in smoke and the calcium dust of a worker's bones:

You, child of my bones,

child of my pulsing blood.

Numerous and naked the city of my poem is here

an underbrush of tortured eyes and shipwrecked hair;

city of rancor and mask of death, of rifle, plane and man,

with its river loosed from his veins and bright roses

growing out of the brains of some dead farmer weeping in the

wheat

or crying in a star, and bread is here and milk and air

and a dream that gave you birth, joyous and painful

as all these other dreams like daisies scattered on the sky.

Oh, bright daughter of my dream,

flower of such sky and brain...

Beside the crime you raise a river and a city

and when this is done you make yourself known

on a day made of petals; you are all color, green

like the earth, brown and blonde and red, light and dark

like the wounded earth; and the gull is there with you,

the nightingale and moss, hope, not in my poem, is there with you

and my grim anguished comrades are with you, the dawn, the city

and the star; with you the water and a river that will never be

still ...

Oh, little girl,

made of my blood where horizons meet!

Jose Portogalo ( Argentina)

translated by Lloyd Mallan

Structure

55 lines · 3 stanzas