(Poema para los poetas de la FipLima)
Received advice from a well-placed
source in the high court that poems
inspired by occasions, birthdays,
anniversaries, Lima’s first
international poetry festival,
don’t break the sound barrier,
will not be picked up in press
that reports to God, will disappear
as days they mark into a rose-
dipped scrapbook, destined,
if kept in order along
with birth certificates
and pictures of the first dog,
for discovery at some future date
by an eager anthropologist
wishing to create a mosaic
of a time and place, a birthday
where various unidentified poets
shuffle notebooks beside
the laureate of the day also
now unread except by a kid
told by his dad that when
he goes to Dublin not
to forget the Crazy Jane poems
or Easter, 1916, the Lake Isle
of Innisfree. Surely, I mock
the idea of tradition and
individual talent. Poets like
Tom Eliot or Yeats are read
still in the thoroughfares
but who knows for sure
unless one leaves instructions
to the kids, to remember
their dads’ books
as they steam-roll ahead
into the marketplace, their
adult dress, the first loves
that will lead to their own
reckoning with the empty page.
»Leer más
