Contraband

The tree of knowledge was the tree of reason.
That´s why the taste of it
drove us from Eden. That fruit
was meant to be dried and milled to a fine powder
for use a pinch at a time, a condiment.
God had probably planned to tell us later
about this new pleasure.

We stuffed our mouths full of it,

gorged on but and if and how and again
but, knowing no better.
It´s toxic in large quantities; fumes
swirled in our heads and around us
to form a dense cloud that hardened to steel,
a wall between us and God, Who was Paradise.
Not that God is unreasonable - but reason
in such excess was tyranny
and locked us into its own limits, a polished cell
reflecting our own faces. God lives
on the other side of that mirror,
but through the slit where the barrier doesn´t
quite touch ground, manages still
to squeeze in - as filtered light,
splinters of fire, a strain of music heard
then lost, then heard again.

Denise Levertov - (1923- 1997)

Obligations of the Poet

Never consider yourself
a privileged intellectual, a book-filled head repeating
the same conversation,
a withered doleful thinker.

You were born to thresh stars
and discover in the trees the laughter of the crowd,
you were born brandishing the future,
seeing through eyes, hands, feet, breast, mouth,
foreteller of things to come
augur of days the sun
is unaware it will rise on,
you were conceived on moonlit nights
when wolves howled and crazed fireflies raced,
your eyes were open when your head first entered the world
and your skin was softer and thinner
than that of those born with eyes closed,
you were favored by joy and sadness,
child of sea and storm,
created to seek treasures in swamps and deserts.
Your legacy was unbounded love,
confidence, unaffected simplicity,
the shadow of chilamate trees,
the trill of black mockingbirds.

Now the depths of the earth
give forth electricity to charge your song,
poems spill from sweaty faces
and eager hands holding primers and pencils;
now you have only to sing of what surrounds you,
the soft pitch
of the fervent voices
of the multitude.

- Giaconda Belli (1948-)

When We Return

When we return to our ancient land
that we never knew
and we talk of all those things
that never happened

We will walk holding children by the hand
who have never existed

We´ll listen to their voices and live
that life that we spoke of so often
and have never lived.

- Daisy Zamora (1950 -)