The South Atlantic Poem by Carlos Suarez

There is no order in those scarce memories of the sea and the land of long shadows.

The traveler’s heart used long ago the few faded colors of winter, the order and concert, names and voices of those who had deals with the roaring forties and the stories of lost crews, of beached vessels dry and gnawed by years of ice and wind, and of men –if you wish—men with large hands; men who sometimes arrived from the pampa or survived once again the mother-like voracity of the sea to tell about it as if music was a place in the eye of the storm and time itself were another deckhand holding a line in the gale while everything around whistles the tune of those who went over in a bad blow on sight of Puerto Deseado.

Memory is a gate without its wall, the sailcloth that burned, the empty robe of some Helena, and you were another pilgrim of despair.


In your land Between Rivers nature’s ravages are a decrepitude of time, a dark rain, a teeming heat populated by desperately slow creatures, and the sudden dawn of birds when dreams and wakefulness shows the other side of memory sinking in the green light of the long windless seasons…

Telling, then, was not a trade of weavers but that of the slow, almost ceremonial motions of swimmers and stalkers, and in the far South the roaring madness of the white wind and the long and long monotony of the land need a harsher, truer voice than the murmurs of those who wait in quiet readiness under the canopy and the sleepy whispers of June’s long drizzles… A voice to tell that at the other end of the planet, where there are no wide rivers, Patagonia faces the manic sea.



A few dunes behind the jagged rocks, and beyond, the old Land of Giants. A wilderness of thorns, the heart of the South, the pampa where the gods still walk at their leisure.

A wandering of birds in their summer and the green wave of the ice plant keeping the wind from blowing the desert into the desolate towns; keeping the sand from covering the rails and the roads sometimes taken by the broken men who must return to Buenos Aires, name of all nostalgias and all promises.

That is the land.

In those places the Creole armies and the Indians fought their wars, and men worked, dreamed and died alone as all others do, with nobody to look into their eyes.

And it was not unlike any other land of men and women who had arrived in hope and desperation to dig and raise their constructions, to claim a place in the open as their own… Not unlike all other places in those Americas that sometimes seem to exist to refute time, to buy it or forget it as one forgets a minor ailment.

…And you forgot it all, except some words in a language searching for completion; a bay waiting for its boats, a cabin at the edge of the open pampa waiting for the hands of its Welsh and Irish shepherds accustomed to the long silence and the large sky where the Southern Cross turns and turns above a country that few know and few remember at the hour of pride, in a time of knives, of joy, of words… while all promises and debts are paid in loneliness.