Sorrow: Five poems
- SorrowFive poems
¿Adónde te escondisteAmado, y me dejaste con gemido?
—San Juan de la Cruz
This Is a Night of Shadows
This is a night of shadows of sword-memories solitude overwhelms me. No one awaits my arrival with a kiss and a rum and a thousand questions. Solitude echoes within me. My heart wishes to burst with rage but it sprouts wings. [End Page 112]
Sorrow
I wish I could believe that I will see you again that our love will bloom again. Perhaps you are an atom of light perhaps your ashes barely exist perhaps you will return and I will be ash an atom of light or far away. Our love will never happen again.
Every Time
Every time I name them my dead are resurrected.
The Lamentation of Ariadne
Don’t lose yourself, Theseus return to me. The beach is deserted I have bloody feet from running in search of you. Was it one of your tricks to leave me asleep on this island? Forgive me, Theseus do you recall how we met? You swore eternal love and I gave you the thread and you returned to the light after destroying the Minotaur. Were you abducted by some jealous God? They do not inspire fear in me neither Poseidon nor Zeus my wrath is fire and will rise from these waters to the heavens. Return, return, Theseus, don’t lose yourself in the labyrinths of death go swiftly along the thread of my love size it, Theseus return to me I am your earth your moon your destiny. Sink your roots in me.
You Are My Other I
You are my other I my vagabond I my mirror-bridge. Converting silences I begin to understand: you are my destiny and I don’t know what to do against your death. Day and night I search for you I distract time with questions and tears and boredom. I search for you in my daybreaks among the shadows in the wilderness of my I in the phosphorescence of vigilance. I search for you in my wound in my sorrow wishing to pierce it to overflow it until I reach you.”
Claribel Alegría has authored over forty-five books, including Ashes of Izalco, Luisa in Realityland, and Sorrow (all published by Curbstone); the poems in this issue are taken from this last work. Alegría was born in Nicaragua and brought up in El Salvador; she attended George Washington University.
Carolyn Forché is a poet, translator, and activist. Her books include Gathering the Tribes (Yale), The Country between Us (Harper and Row), and The Angel of History (HarperCollins), and she is editor of the anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (Norton). She teaches at George Mason University.
