MY MOTHER'S DEATH HAS A NAME

by Ana Istarú
translated by Mark Smith-Soto

 

 

my mother’s death has a name
many names with first names and surnames
 
I know no one sweating bent over with pain
will go from door to door calling out
where is the high school girl
the one they killed with their trigger fingers
the town’s powerful men
the ones who wrote around her neck
a stuttering red
 
I know no one paid for her ransom
Matilde dies
 
they throw her from the tile roof of the church
after all took their communion from her skull
 
young she was a youthful girl
later my mother
 
later she wanted to touch the pieces of the game
throw the chess set over
enter like a woman in the circle of men
twisting as best she could the sharp edges
the dragon’s teeth
trying to touch that pot of power
burning her hands with dignity
to twist
the pieces of that game
brandishing her truth
 
the dead schoolgirl was convinced
she was a queen trying to fly
she was in love
with this little plot of fatherland
although that love sounded unpleasing
to the town’s powerful men
 
it doesn’t matter
since she had much love of the good kind
and the concierges loved her
the common people and
the few honest men that we still have
the women loved her of course
 
she was a queen trying to fly
clutched to her decency to her armor
of incorruptible love
 
now she is dead
they killed her with cancer with weariness
with the gross gangrening of courage
 
they sealed her eyes, they sold her
set fire to her marble chair
to watch her in flames
to burn her
unmoved schoolgirl
incidentally they burned my mother
 
now they wear her ashes in their buttonholes
 
my mother’s death has a name
many names with first names and surnames
 
right now they are resting in their houses
visiting their wounded mistresses
carrying their souls in a rotten glass
in truth
they act like they don’t know
 
no difference
 
I have a corpse of gold
I have an inviolate death
I will go dancing down the street with her body
falling to crumbs
I have Matilde enough to tint the sea
 
they
when they see what they may see
let them see me
 
to burn a woman like Iphigenia
 
death will come to them soon enough
the terrible cramp
I will dance with them that day
and in that thick spider
of their heart
I will lay a burning blade my orphanhood
 
I will look at them
I will look at them
 
 
I will look at them
 
until then
they
when they see what they may see
let them see me
in the eyes of their children and their children
amen

 

 

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