THE SNACK Poem by Andrea Cote

Remember also María
those afternoons at four o'clock
in our burnt port
Our port
was rather a foundering bonfire
or a wasteland
or a flash of lightning.

Remember the lighted up ground,
and how we scratched the back of the earth
as if disinterring the green pasture.

The backyard where the snacks were handed out,
our plate brimming with onions
that our mother salted for us,
that our father bagged for us.

But in spite of everything,
you know,
we would have liked to invite God
to sit at the head of our table,
God but without the Word
without prodigies
and only so that you would know,
María,
that God is everywhere
and also in your plate of onions
even if it makes you cry.

But above all,
remember me and the wound,
before they grazed from my hands
in the wheat field of the onions
to make our bread
the hunger of all of our days
and so that now
that you don't even remember
and the bad seed feeds the wheat field of the vanished
I reveal to you, María,
that it is not your fault
nor the fault of your forgetting,
that this is time
and this its doing.