By Nancy Morejón
July 4, 2022
The dead are what’s absent,
forgotten, inert.
A bell rings out
its loneliness swaying amid the roses.
The dead come out at night
or they come out in the afternoon
to feed from gourds,
from lecterns,
from other people’s throats,
from guitar pegs,
from the key and the calabash,
from scissors blunted by use,
on the concrete of plazas,
on savage smells,
on nectar,
on bone.
In the drop of water
appears the face of the dead.
In the fragment of the sea that the passerby glimpses
lies hidden the universe of the dead.
The dead hang from the hours.
They slake the thirst of a poet friend.
The dead endure.
The dead sing.
(Translated, from the Spanish, by Pamela Carmell.)