Letter to Time
after Claribel Alegría’s “Carta al tiempo”
Dear Sir:
I write this letter on my birthday.
I received your gift. I don’t like it.
It’s always, always the same.
When I was a girl, I waited, impatient;
I put on my party dress
and went out to the street to proclaim you.
Don’t be so mulish.
I see you still,
playing chess with my grandfather,
dropping by occasionally,
but soon, every day,
my grandfather’s voice losing its brilliance.
And you, insistent, with no respect
for his sweet nature,
nor his shoes.
And after all this, you flirted with me,
you with your implacable gaze,
kind to my father
in order to win me over —
I was a teenager!
My poor grandfather,
you there at his deathbed, waiting,
waiting.
And something,
some oddness floating through the rooms,
around the furniture –
the walls grew pale.
And there was someone else,
You, quietly, giving him the nod.
He closed my grandfather’s eyes
and then, for a moment,
studied me.
Stay away!
Every time I see you
I feel the cold run through my spine.
I beg you,
quit following me.
I’ve loved someone else for years;
there’s nothing you can offer me.
Why are you waiting always in the shop windows,
in the mouth of sleep,
under Sunday’s evasive sky?
I’ve seen you with the children,
your casual hello,
the door locked behind you.
Oh, I recognize the suit:
the same tweed
as when I was a schoolgirl
and you were friends with my father,
your absurd summer-and-autumn suit.
Let me say it again:
do not come back and hang out in my garden.
You’ll frighten the children
and the leaves will fall –
I’ve seen it happen.
Oh, what good is all this?
You’ll chuckle a bit
as you have forever —
those children, my face, the leaves
adrift in your eyes.
There’s no fixing it.
I knew it the moment I started this letter.
* * * * *
That Kiss
after Claribel Alegría’s “Ese Beso”
That kiss
yesterday — a door
swung wide,
and every memory
I believed was a ghost
sprang up,
persistent,
to bite me.
* * * * *
All Told
after Claribel Alegría’s “Contabilizando”
In the 68 years
I have lived,
there are some electric moments:
the joy of my feet
jumping through puddles,
six hours in Machu Pichu,
the 10 minutes needed
to lose my virginity,
the telephone’s buzz
as I waited for my mother’s death,
the raspy voice
announcing Monsignor Romero’s murder,
15 minutes in Delft,
the first cries of my daughter,
the countless years
dreaming my people free,
some immortal deaths,
the eyes of that starving child, your eyes
immersing me in love,
a forget-me-not afternoon,
and in this muggy hour
the yearning to fuse myself
into verse,
into a bellow,
into a spray of foam.
* * * * *
Claribel Alegría, born in 1924, is one of the most celebrated poets of Latin America. Twice exiled in her life — first as an infant from her native Nicaragua during the Somoza dictatorship, and later from her adopted El Salvador after the 1980 death-squad assassination of Archbishop Romero — Alegría was always mindful of the inextricability of the personal and political, often highlights the oppression of the poor and of women.
At the behest of future Nobel Prize winner Juan Ramón Jiménez, who brought out her first book of poems, Anillo de silencio (Ring of Silence) in 1948, Alegría enrolled in George Washington University where she studied philosophy. There she met her husband, journalist Darwin J. “Bud” Flakoll. Their personal, and sometimes professional, collaboration flourished for 47 years until his death in 1995. Alegría published over 40 books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, and was awarded the Neustadt Prize, the Queen Sofía Iberoamerican Poetry Prize, and the Casa de las Americas Prize. She died in 2018 93 in Nicaragua.