Biography

Let us hull the rice.
let us make the sound of the seed
and laugh the laughter of new rice
that sheds its dusty cassock
and jumps up naked as a child
and glides on hardly held by our song
that winnows it and blows it by name.

Let us praise the yellow brilliance,
mandarin of snowy robe,
urchin scraped from a plate to a newspaper,
a bit of news itself in the mouth of the beggar who gulps it
syllable by syllable
digging with the chopsticks of his fingers
into its compact snow
as if groping for all the lost treasures of the earth.

Praise to fields of tall rice
of the singers of Salcedo, the women who blow grain
singing the lesson of its plenty
to the indifferent world that has forgotten it.

Translated by JoAnne Engelbert

Manuel Rueda is considered to be one of the foremost Dominican poets of the 20th century. He is the author of numerous volumes of poetry as well as of essays on cultural history and criticism, among them Imágenes del dominicano (1998), Las metamorfosis de Makandal (1998), and Pluralismo (1988). Rueda died in December 1999.

From Las edades del viento (Santo Domingo: Editora Alfa & Omega, 1979).

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