For My Young Friends Who Are Afraid

There is a country to cross you will
find in the corner of your eye, in
the quick slip of your foot--air far
down, a snap that might have caught.
And maybe for you, for me, a high, passing
voice that finds its way by being
afraid. That country is there, for us,
carried as it is crossed. What you fear
will not go away: it will take you into
yourself and bless you and keep you.
That's the world, and we all live there.

---William Stafford

आँखों में रहा दिल में उतर कर नहीं देखा

आँखों में रहा दिल में उतर कर नहीं देखा
कश्ती के मुसाफ़िर ने समुंदर नहीं देखा

बे-वक़्त अगर जाऊँगा सब चौंक पड़ेंगे
इक उम्र हुई दिन में कभी घर नहीं देखा

जिस दिन से चला हूँ मिरी मंज़िल पे नज़र है
आँखों ने कभी मील का पत्थर नहीं देखा

ये फूल मुझे कोई विरासत में मिले हैं
तुम ने मिरा काँटों भरा बिस्तर नहीं देखा

यारों की मोहब्बत का यक़ीं कर लिया मैं ने
फूलों में छुपाया हुआ ख़ंजर नहीं देखा

महबूब का घर हो कि बुज़ुर्गों की ज़मीनें
जो छोड़ दिया फिर उसे मुड़ कर नहीं देखा

ख़त ऐसा लिखा है कि नगीने से जड़े हैं
वो हाथ कि जिस ने कोई ज़ेवर नहीं देखा

पत्थर मुझे कहता है मिरा चाहने वाला
मैं मोम हूँ उस ने मुझे छू कर नहीं देखा

 

---बशीर बद्र

It is Night, in My Study

It is night, in my study.
The deepest solitude; I hear the steady
shudder in my breast
—for it feels all alone,
and blanched by my mind—
and I hear my blood
with even murmur
fill up the silence.

You might say the thin stream
falls in the waterclock and fills the bottom.
Here, in the night, all alone, this is my study;
the books don't speak;
my oil lamp
bathes these pages in a light of peace,
light of a chapel.

The books don't speak;
of the poets, the meditators, the learned,
the spirits drowse;
and it is as if around me circled
cautious death.

I turn at times to see if it waits,
I search the dark,
I try to discern among the shadows
its thin shadow,
I think of heart failure,
think about my strong age; since my fortieth year
two more have passed.

Toward a looming temptation
here, in the solitude, the silence turns me—
the silence and the shadows.

And I tell myself: "Perhaps when soon
they come to tell me
that supper awaits,
they will discover a body here
pallid and cold
—the thing that I was, this one who waits—
just like those books quiet and rigid,
the blood already stopped,
jelling in the veins,
the chest silent
under the gentle light of the soothing oil,
a funeral lamp.

I tremble to end these lines
that they do not seem
an unusual testament,
but rather a mysterious message
from the shade beyond,
lines dictated by the anxiety
of eternal life.
I finished them and yet I live on.

---Miguel de Unamuno

translated by William Stafford and Lillian Jean Stafford.

The Nobodies / Los nadies

Fleas dream of buying themselves a dog,
and nobodies dream of escaping from poverty,
that one magical day
good luck will soon rain,
that good luck will pour down,
but good luck doesn't rain, neither yesterday
nor today,nor tomorrow, nor ever,
nor does good fall from the sky in little mild showers,
however much the nobodies call for it,
even if their left hands itch
or they get up using their right feet,
or they change their brooms at new year.

The nobodies: the children of nobody, that masters of nothing,
The nobodies: the nothings, those made nothing,
running after the hare, dying life, fucked, totally fucked:

who are not, although they were.
Who speak no languages, only dialects.
Who have no religions, only superstitions.
Who have have no arts, only crafts.
Who have no culture, only folklore.
Who are not human beings, but human resources.
Who have faces, only arms.
Who don't have names, only numbers.
Who don't count in world history,
just in the local press's stories of violence, crime, misfortune and disaster,.

The nobodies who are worth less than the bullets that kill them.

--- Eduardo Galeano

Dust

It’s my turn at the water point:
The trickle is slower today
Each day, slower,
One day, it may stop;
And my field has withered,
Rusted-dry in the staring sun,
The crevices filling with dust.
Tin buckets clash behind me
And a loud voice roughly bawls
“Don’t fill that bucket full!
Fool – don’t you know you’ll slop?”
I withdraw, abashed. It’s true:
I mustn’t spill a precious drop
Not even as a libation
To the gloating sun.

I saw a young man gunned down
As I shopped in the market place.
Two thick thuds, and then he fell,
And thrashed a bit, on his face.
That’s all. He sprawled in the staring sun.
(They whirled away in a cloud of dust
In a smart white van.)
His blood laid the dust
In a scarlet little shower,
Scarlet little flowers.
In the staring sun, the little flowers
Will burn and turn to rust.

I stumble home through arid fields
My furtive footsteps hushed by dust.
I scan the sky – hard, limpid, deep –
O pure and high is heaven’s sky!
Is there no shade for me? I weep
To hide from the glaring eye of heaven.
(Cain, my brother Cain!
I know your fear, your guilt, your pain –
I too have now a brother slain,
I too am sealed with the scarlet stain!)
My ink has crusted in my pen
And in my heart – the dust.

---Nini Lungalang

सड़क पर किसान

 "जिनकी जेबें भरने के लिए 

किसानों का पेट तुम काट रहे 

सब जानते हैं छुप-छुप कर 

किस-किसके तलवे चाट रहे 

क्यों तुमसे न वह आज लड़ेगा 

मूर्तियाँ गिराते-गिराते 

गिर गए हैं जो अपने भीतर 

हुजूम किसानों का फिर से उन्हें 

सवालों के चौराहे पर खड़ा करेगा।"

—जसिंता केरकेट्टा

Poem of Love (Poema de Amor)

They who widened the Panama Canal
(and were classified “silver roll” and “gold roll”),
they who repaired the Pacific fleet at California bases,
they who rotted in the jails of Guatemala,
Mexico, Honduras, Nicaragua *
for being thieves, smugglers, swindlers, for being hungry,
they always suspicious of everything
(“permit me to haul you in as a suspect
for hanging out on corners suspiciously, and furthermore
with the pretentious air of being Salvadorian”),
they who packed the bars and brothels of all the ports
and capitals of the region
(“The Blue Cave,” “Hot Pants,” “Happyland”),
the planters of corn deep in foreign jungles,
the kings of cheap porn,
they who no one knows where they come from,
the best artisans of the world,
they who were stitched by bullets crossing the border,
they who died of malaria
or by the sting of scorpions or yellow fever
in the hell of banana plantations,
the drunkards who cried for the national anthem
under a cyclone of the Pacific or northern snows,
the moochers, the beggars, the dope pushers,
guanaco sons of bitches,
they who hardly made it back,
they who had a little more luck,
the eternally undocumented,
the jack-of-all trades, the hustlers, the gluts,
the first the flash a knife,
the sad, the saddest of all,
my people, my brothers.

---Roque Dalton

*Somoza’s era in Nicaragua.
Translated from the Spanish by Zoë Anglesey and Daniel Flores Ascencio.