El dia que me muera / pido mucho sol en el cemetario. – Marjorie Agosin
For the day I die / I request bright sunlight in the cemetery.
On the first day of spring, nothing sweet
splintered from the earth, no bright birth,
no green tongue, no blossom
wrung from the taut skin of winter.
No. It snowed.
And within my own body
death lurked like a half-frozen slough in darkness,
melting, melting, mottled with drowned duck eggs
and the cracked ribs of canoes.
I thought of the arms of young men severed in warring countries,
cleaned to a porcelain gleam by ants and maggots.
Marjorie, I do not ask for sunlight in the cemetery.
I want sunlight on the faces of mountains,
sunlight running down the jade throats of my summer
valleys,
sunlight on my own face and throat, breasts, fingers,
through tender curtains of rain,
through my white cotton skirt,
on skin, skin.
But long winter coils through me,
a corkscrew of ice and darkness.
My nails tear like papyrus.
It is the first day of spring, now,
a moment named by an idiot in an ugly suit.
How the earth chuckles at our checkered pages of time.
As if the slim poultice of days
could heal the silence seething within us.