A Handful of Earth


                            I




A handful of earth
of your profound breadth;
of your height of perennial solitude;
of your forehead of clay
weighted down with germinal sobs.

A handful of earth,
with the simple caress of its salt
and its exposed sweetness of roots.

A handful of earth that holds in its lips
the smile and the blood of your dead.

A handful of earth
to bring closer to its ignited number
all the coldness that comes with death.

And some remnant of the shadow’s slow grove
keeps me watching over your sleeping eyelids.
I wanted from You your night of orange blossoms;
I wanted your hot and wooded meridian
I wanted the mineral nourishments that populate
the rough coasts of your buried body,
and I wanted the wood of your breast.

That’s what I wanted of You
-- Country of my joy and sorrow;
That’s what I wanted of You.



                                    II




Now I am naked anew.
Naked and desolate
over a precipice of memories;
lost between bends in the darkness.
Naked and desolate.
far from the steady symbol of your blood.
Far.

I no longer have the remote jasmine of your stars,
nor the nocturnal siege of your jungles.
Nothing: not your days of guitars and knives,
nor the forgetful clarity of your sky.

Alone like a rock or a cry
I name you and, when I search for
the return of your name’s glory
I know that Rock is rock and that river’s Water
flees from your wary waist and that birds
make use of lofty protection in the humbled trees
like a cliff face of their song and wings.



                            III




But here, walking, under distinct clouds;
over fabricated profiles of other towns,
suddenly, I recover you.

For between invincible solitudes,
or in blind alleys of music and wheatfields,
I find you stretched out at length by my side,
with your martyred crown and your clear
memory of Guaranias and oranges.

You are in me: you walk in my steps,
you speak in my throat; you raise up in my lime
and you die, when I die, every night.

You are in me with all your flags;
with your honest working hands
and your small irreplacable moon.

Inevitably
-- with the punctual constancy of constellations --
they come to me, present and earthly:
your hair a torrent of rains;
your seaward nostalgia and your immense
sorrow of thirsty plains.

You inhabit me and I inhabit you:
submerged in your wounds,
I watch over your forehead that, dying, awakens.

I am at peace with you;
neither ravens nor hatred
can make me shorten your waist:
I know that I carry your Root and your Sum
over the mountain range of my shoulders.

And that I have of You.
A handful of earth:
that’s what I wanted of you.


Herib Campos Cervera