Massacres
The Cathars murdered at the hand of Innocent III.
The mother-in-waiting who died with a child in her belly in Nagasaki.
The three-year-old orphan in Auschwitz who only spoke one word.
All of them massacred. And nothing else happened.
There they were among the piles of cadavers.
They didn’t matter. No one spoke of them. They were not individuals. They were a heap.
Like a mountain. More. A mountain range.
Left there. Escaping from the solitude of being born.
Each birth a solitude. Each death, too. But they were all jumbled up,
on the ground, on top of the grass that was eating them.
Until some vulture in the sky. And they quickly flew off. Or a fox. They flew off. They ran.
No God rewarded them. You were good, you were bad.
Only animals went to console them. Animals. Just as in life.
Animals came. With small mouths, or bigger. Also.
Clouds came. With white cloud mouths.
The clouds rained, the animals embraced them.
They played at fire with stones. Trees came to them.
History must also tell this tale.
Our Mother
Mother mine, who art I know not where
of whom all I have is a name . . .
Our mother who art in heat
blessed be your cunt
your epidural, your midwife,
may your screams reach us,
your love, your strength.
Your will be done in our uterus
on earth.
Give us this day our everydays,
and let not the sons of bitches
abort love, make war,
no, deliver us from them
now and forever,
Vagina.
A(wo)men . . .
Scouring Pad
With my rough green scouring pad, green as a pasture, I scrub, sawing your name with my jaw into my cranial cavity, already full of names, and on top of the names, stones, and on top of the stones, continents, and on top of the continents the necropolis of the stars, when an intense rain erases it and licks my lips so that I will say and say and say. And never stop saying.
So I scrape, I scrub, until I draw blood and from the blood are born rocks with a heart in the core. And from my mouth falls a name that rolls down to where the horses lick the shadow of the flightless birds.
Three Poems
Dolors Miquel
translated from the Catalan by Mary Ann Newman
Listen to the original read by the poet:
Dolors Miquel (b. 1960, Lleida, Catalonia) has an extensive and heterogeneous poetic oeuvre (Haikus del Camioner, El guant de plàstic rosa, Missa Pagesa, La dona que mirava la tele, etc.), in which she has adapted a broad range of influences to her very personal style and voice. Her poetry has earned her many tributes and awards throughout the years. She has made the occasional passing incursion into the worlds of fiction and theater. Her own particular style of reciting has made her one of the most sought-after reciters in her country. Her revolutionary, transgressive, and slightly reckless attitude has garnered her no few confrontations, mostly with the authorities, from which she has emerged fairly unscathed. Her motto is: “There will be time to be silent when I’m dead.” A translation of the poet's Haikus del camioner is forthcoming in English in November as Truck Driver Haikus, translated by Clyde Moneyhun and released by Francis Boutle Publishers.
Mary Ann Newman translates from Catalan and Spanish. She has published fiction by Quim Monzó, poetry by Josep Carner, and essays by Xavier Rubert de Ventós. Her latest publication is Private Life by Josep Maria de Sagarra (Archipelago, 2015), for which she won awards from Òmnium Cultural in 2016 and the North American Catalan Society in 2017. In 1998, she was awarded the Creu de Sant Jordi, the highest civic distinction in Catalonia.
