The Music of Villa-Lobos Poem by Olga Cabral

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.