Translation

In my home town the nights are warm
and flies are watchful at the net,
as if Remember posted guards
along the borders of Forget.

And all night long in slow exchange
a dialogue of plunk and plink
from leaky roof to rusty basin
echoes what the raindrops think.

Along the wall where the lizards hunt
mosquitoes urge their long complaint
and pious photographs commingle
the dead, the living and the saint.

One rooster, two, then five or six
from hill to valley rout the night,
and maids sigh up from creaky springs
to morning prayer and kitchen light

Along my narrow shuttered street
trot little donkeys gray with dust,
stopping to nuzzle here and there
at orange peel and cracker dust.

And morning takes the river road
down the bank where childhood lives,
where stones and water know my name
and stroke me with diminutives.

Rhina P. Espaillat is a poet and teacher, born in the Dominican Republic but who has spent all of her adult life in the United States. The author of Lapsing to Grace (1992) and Where Horizons Go (1998), winner of the 1998 T.S. Eliot Prize, her prize-winning work has been widely anthologized. She lives in Newburyport, Massachusetts.

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