Someone is speaking a lost language.
It is the music of Villa-Lobos.
I try to remember: where was I
born? And from what continent
untimely torn? I might have been
a priestess among the caymans
guarding the eye-jewel of the
crocodile god. I might have sailed
orinocos of diamonds, seas of coconuts,
leased the equator for life and learned
my ancestral language.
But I have only some old sleeves of rain
in a trunk with spiders
to remember my ancestors by.
They have left me
nothing, and I have forgotten
that island of my birth
where the sun in his suit of mirrors
was seen once only with my vast fetal eye.
But in the music of Villa-Lobos
a god with a tower of green faces
comes striding across cities
of permafrost, and I am summoned
once again to the jaguar gardens
guarded by waterfalls
where the hummingbird people are at play
far from the cold auroras of the north.
This poem has not been translated into any other language yet.
I would like to translate this poem