Tiger life over our lives

with which net will I capture you?

I love you, hostile bird.

  Andrée Chedid

For years and years and years

it was hard to wake up on this earth

marked by fear

while the dead and the eagles curled up

under the moon.

It has always been difficult to learn

the torture

of not finding eyes in the eyes

and agreeing that the bread and the word

were a long chill.

For years and years

identity was un-drawing itself

among ancient voices.

Today everything in you charms us.

Even you, beautiful and darkest death.

 
Under the Elements

Rain:
anoints my skin

washes my eyes.

My night opens itself

for you.

My roaming.

My infinite straying 

pursues me.

What voices from what heavens

do you bring me?

What god

cries
that I don’t hear?
 
Uncertain brew

I hang out the dawn

and the hours don’t know it.

The boy who was my heart

lights other terrors.

Further away than lightening

Who spoke of calmness?

I hang out the dawn

The great unknown!

Perhaps time

will be my biggest shadow.

Maybe my eternally lost steps

will look for me in stray cities

and all over the earth

they’ll be afraid of finding me.

Maybe my eye and his astonishment

will sneak off.

The panic of finding each other

—because there’s no night for the blind star

nor a memory that helps

without being awake under the moon—

Fevered soul who then

saw the dignity of a dead person

passing with an ineffable face.

I hang out the dawn

and I mark myself with poppies.

As if I were a god

who in confusion

searches for his pain in me,

silence passes.

The slow rain falls.

Night and

I
will have to get together

for the party of the eclipse.

Night and I

together in the broken mirror,

as if the same god

terrified
measured us in his nothingness.

[Amparo Osorio]