The Desert (4) [The desert cries out...] Poem by Raúl Zurita

The desert cries out, the dry empty port cries
out, the sea of stones cries out whipped by the
wind. Mireya places flowers for the crew of a
black rusty ship. Each flower has a name and
they bend together like handkerchiefs saying
goodbye. Mireya says she is the mother of a
ship of disappeared beached in the desert. She
says the ship is Chile, that it used to be a ship of living people but that now it cuts through the
sea of stones with its dead children.

The flowers bend. Waves and waves of stones
smash against the sides of a rusty hull.

There is a dry empty port and a ship with a
crew of dead people aground in the middle of
the desert. Mireya says they are her children.
The sea of stones shouts out.

Chile runs aground and sinks in the dry stony
slopes of the waves.

Translated by William Rowe