Salgado Maranhão
Translated from the Portuguese by Alexis Levitin
They got us this far
exploding from their avarice—
with praise and laurel-leafed
decapitations.

They got us this far
(with winches) for us to sprout
from dry stalks:

a cutting wind and muscular
reason inaugurating
pain;

the long archive of dawns
awaiting
                  constellations
of marbled death.

And an arm's tillage
that strengthens the soil
and its seeds (the arm that
both whips and cradles).

And so I sleep above the rift
open to the radiation
of centuries—and I go on

with those who have abandoned
any pilgrimage of return.

What I haven't yet become
the rising cliff suggests to me.

Who erected that trapeze
with its rotten ropes?

Who seeded that orchard
of clouds?

And this jungle
in the streets of language?

The poem begs for silence
so it may dream.



Como Un Rio 12

Trouxeram-nos até aqui
à pilha da usura -
com louvores e degolas
laureadas;

trouxeram-nos até aqui
(a guindaste) para brotar
nos caules secos:

o vento cáustico e a razão
muscular inaugurando
a dor;

o longo acervo de auroras
a guardar
                       constelações
de mármore.

E o lavrar do braço
que arrima o solo
e as sementes (o braço, que é
açoite e capuz).

Então durmo sobre a fenda
aberta à radiação
dos séculos -, e sigo

com os que perderam
a caravana de volta.

O que ainda não sou
me acena o penhasco.

Quem ergueu esse trapézio
com as cordas rotas?

Quem semeou esse pomar
de nuvens?

E esta selva
nas ruas da língua?

O poema pede silêncio
para sonhar.
from the book CONSECRATION OF THE WOLVES / The Bitter Oleander Press
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Salgado’s father was a white landowner, his mother, who raised him, a black field worker of tremendous moral courage. Salgado rose from childhood poverty and illiteracy to become one of Brazil’s leading contemporary poets. In this twelve-poem sequence, drawn from "Consecration of the Wolves," the unifying image is the river of time and of history, which, like blood, links ancestral suffering to present-day pain accompanied by poetry’s hope.

Alexis Levitin on "Like A River 12"
"The Wilderness of Language in Atsuro Riley’s Heard-Hoard"

"Atsuro Riley's second full-length poetry collection is an onomatopoeic potpourri. In it, language, like nature, is elemental—a way of speaking and being in the world. Reminiscent of Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology as Gerard Manley Hopkins's poems, the collection calls us back to the roots of language, breaking it apart and putting it back together."

via PLOUGHSHARES
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"Her poetic line stretches out like a horizon barely visible over the steering wheel. Of course, if you've never burned a tank of gas, cross-hatching city streets on a late spring Sunday afternoon, braiding the voices of Al Green or Smokey Robinson through the ribbons of heat rising from the asphalt, this book is an invitation to joyride."
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