The Allotted Shadow Poem by Gonzalo Márquez Cristo

Night freed your eyes. The young woman with the shaved head threw the snails and read the dream of the solitaries.

To an adolescent girl the fear of love was revealed . . . A stranger drank a face. We saw the man of the shared wife.

Delirium was the vengeance of the defeated.

I imagined a desire that was a nocturnal sea and I found my birth. Ardour rocked me. We were grateful to the wound.

I attempted the undecipherable. I felt the writing of the waves and I knew that in your body darkness stopped . . .

Inside you I feasted what was lost. I renewed my death and at the same time I felt I was leaving.

I escaped. My rapture stretched out my desolation. The vertigo hid ardour from me but did not abolish the deserts.

The body also was words.

We resisted the decline of the ritual and the beauty of he who never forgets to leave.

They told us the only meeting-place was death.

We sought the liberation of the origin.

I feel that the earth

answers all my questions.

Translation: 2008, Nicolás Suescún