PHA-Exchange> A poem for these days of turmoil...

[Claudio Schuftan]

ROSALIA

       Orlando Leon (1970s Venezuelan young poet) (*)

Rosalia Sanchez has seven children,
twelve diseases, three abortions,
and a shanty and garbage for a sociologist's fruition.
Rosalia is twenty seven years, one hundred years, five thousand years old.
For fifty years, one hundred years, five hundred  years,
Rosalia has needed to eat.
Who wants to buy the eating machine of Rosalia?
Who wants to buy five hundred years, five hundred Rosalias?
... not making a technical point about the quinquenia?
Rosalia is a maid who once had a policeman, who once had a share-cropper,
who once had a child, ... seven times a child.
Rosalia is made of bones, is made of flesh; the same as a cow, the same as a
hen,
but without a pasture, without a coup.
Hay for Rosalia! Maize for Rosalia! Rice for Rosalia!
For five hundred, one thousand, twelve thousand years, since the times of Ur
and Uruk,
Rosalia has wanted a staple food to eat.
When they were painting in the caves of Altamira,
Rosalia was twenty years old, had three children, and the moon was
shining...
Rosalia has always had three children,
twenty years of age, one abortion, and the moon was shining...
Pregnant, Rosalia lives under a bridge.
I can see Rosalia.  Rosalia is lucky to live in an organized world!...
Rosalia fills forms to ask for a little house.
Rosalia stands in line in the Ministry of Public Health, lines lasting five
hours,
with a pissed child in her arms.
-The President says: "No citizen will... , etc."
Rosalia indeed lives in an organized world...
There is a Constitution, Human Rights, Prostitution, the Church.
But, if Rosalia doesn't have enough to eat a biscuit,
how can she understand the palpitations of a refrigerator,
or to soak in milk an automobile,
or lying on a sofa switch-on a record player?
And this is Civilization, now that Rosalia cannot squeeze,
at five o'clock, a jazz in tea?
Rosalia has to live in an organized world!
We have already gone to the moon:
"I'll drop you a line from the moon, love!"
Potatoes in photosynthesis, carnations in photosynthesis, roses in
photosynthesis.
Through a chemical orchard the insects will fly.
But Rosalia has seven children,
in midst of Civilization,
a metaphysical Civilization that cannot solve the problems of Rosalia...
How many years is it that Rosalia has been going with her children from dung
to dung,
from Constitution to Constitution, from God to God!?
Rosalia is twenty seven years old, one hundred years old, five thousand
years old.
Rosalia has dung in her dreams,
Rosalia dreams about dung,
But dung is not herself.

 (*): Translated from the Spanish by C. Schuftan