Tyrant-Poem
I
We will shake our bodies like animals abandoned in the forest,
and the moon will sing lullabies for the
dead;
the dead who were mine and did not know how to die peaceful deaths;
and the hour will come,
and it will carry away in colorful shrouds
the faces of the barbarians;
we will stand tall
but at what cost?
at what cost
will we survive their cruelty?
If the poem with which I drive my hand into this land
does not serve to withstand their assaults
then it is not a poem.
If the poem with which you drive your hand into this land
does not withstand, rewrite it.
If the poem is there
between its jaws, the earth will rise again;
between its jaws, executioners and traitors will die.
II
We must seek the country that lies
between the ledges, even if what we find is not the same.
We are already in the final lines
and we have not even honored the poem
that roars behind the mountains.
Listen to me well:
Beware of the poem that emerges
from its hidden zone,
it will come like tyrants fall:
without warning
and eager
to kill.
Salvador de Bahia
Set out from any point.
They are all similar.
They all lead to a point of departure:
A window, a cliff, a
back to hold on to when the night gets rough,
your legs wide open in the middle of summer,
Salvador de Bahia,
The South so blue,
your long speeches
about justice, memory,
the terror, not yet overcome.
How could I not remember that
as the beginning of many other endings.
The silence
—that was so rare in that city—
resting quietly in your open fists.
You were tired of fighting the wars of your ancestors,
the same wars that your children would have to fight,
that’s why you chose not to have any.
That and the economy:
that’s a luxury only rich women can afford,
maybe they’ll rent my body for a few months,
and that’s the closest I’ll get to experience motherhood.
Then you’d laugh and pass some more dendê
correcting my Portuguese with your soft tongue.
I hated dendê but never said it
to avoid hurting your feelings.
Mas você parece saída duma revista de Nova York.
That’s what you said
when you saw me at the bar
wearing those leather boots,
nobody wears boots here, you said
showing me your flip flops;
you told me in Rio you called them “chinelos”
that’s the first word you taught me.
The second one was “sapatona”
which I understood to mean dyke.
You wore that label proudly,
you said it took many battles to wear it that way.
Our last day at the beach
you bought me coconut water,
when we said goodbye you cried a little,
took one last selfie
and said holding my hand:
good is to forgive evil,
remember,
there is no other good.
Not us
To Jeanette Vizguerra
If we cannot make poetry a cry
let us clench our fists
and search beneath the earth
for the mirror that shows us
the most fleeting truth;
we are all the same,
connected by tiny threads
that never break.
Politics is also
to amplify language
against the despot.
Language,
which does not speak for itself
but designates others.
Let us name
things as they are
so that the executioners
do not render us mute.
They expected us to bow down
before the oppressor,
but we poets
raised our hands
and gathered the daughters of others
in our arms.
We come with sharpened tongues,
carrying the truth and the word
in our pockets.
What do they carry
in their mouths of salt?
Others will tremble,
not us.
Others will fall,
not us:
We
who exist,
demand our own
possibility
to seek justice
not only for the dignity of life,
but also for its tears.
Carlota Roby is a human rights attorney, and the co-founder of the project Vocales Verticales. She is also a poet and a cat lover. Originally from Venezuela, she resides in Washington D.C.
Image: Paul R. Burley, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
