Poems Postcard and The Persians

Postcard

Night view of downtown
Montevideo, I don’t recognize the violet
air of the streets, yet a hard
amethyst of memory, a resistant
prey of days.
I won’t die in Montevideo,
yet hands show me the way
to the motionless top that spun with the world
(night view of my childhood).
Yet photos declared and faith
yellowed in drawers, unrecognizable
night view atop my bed, inverse
world, in another language, a top
of lies: eyes still prey to the hard
memory of other days.

The Persians

According to Herodotus, Xerxes’ armada
had already left Sardis on its way to Salamis
when the sun began to abandon its place in the sky
and disappear. The day, serene, no shadow of a cloud,
went shifting into night. The sun
took on the color of sapphire and, as they eyed each other,
the soldiers saw themselves as pale as the dead.
Everything seemed to be bathed in a dark steam.
Wonder and fear took over the hearts
of those young men. Xerxes saw the miracle,
followed it attentively, and asked his wise men
what it meant. The sky, they responded,
announced to the Greeks the destruction of their cities
since the sun, they said, is the Greeks’ prophetic star,
and the moon, the Persians’. Xerxes, dumbfounded,
was delighted by the response, comforted his men
with confident words and -Herodotus will never
stop talking- ordered them to return to the route.
As they died they understood: we’re dying
from an eclipse, eternal like sapphire,
and we’ll follow the return of moons
while a Greek choralist recites our names.
This alone we lived for.
Xerxes died in his palace, murdered by a traitor.

Translators: Katherine Kedeen and Víctor Rodríguez Núñez