El Día del Indio Americano: un homenaje al Pueblo Maya
Posted: April 19, 2012 Filed under: English, Juan Felipe Herrera, Spanish Comments Off on El Día del Indio Americano: un homenaje al Pueblo MayaDos poemas por Juan Felipe Herrera / Two poems by Juan Felipe Herrera
de un homenaje al Pueblo Maya / from an homage to the Mayan People
_____
Morning opens like the grasses
of my pueblo, leaves of corn and orange squash.
The dreams of the wounded
rise to caress her, they weave yellow crosses,
woolen suns, rivers of lances.
It rains on the streets,
maids scurry to the market.
Their laughter and jokes, their heavy dresses.
The twittering kiosk lets go of its copper
and city life begins. Once more
another river happens. Flows down my braids
all the way to my heart.
My mother Pascuala’s hands
weave onto mine. At times the wounds
close and what is left is only
the act of being reborn.
_____
La mañana se abre como las pastos
de mi pueblo, hojas de maíz y anaranjada calabaza.
Los sueños de los heridos
suben a acariciarla, tejen cruces amarillas
soles de lana, ríos de lanzas.
Llueve en las calles,
las criadas se apreseran al mercado.
Sus risas y sus chistes, sus enaguas pesadas.
El quiosco cantarín suelta su cobre
y empieza la vida en la ciudad. Una vez más,
otro río nace. Desciende por mis trenzas
hasta mi corazón.
Las manos de mi madre Pascuala
se tejen en las mías. A veces las heridas
se cierran y queda solamente
el acto de renacer.
_____
The pueblo’s triumph will rise from a torn branch,
in a landscape of a wounded mare and a ruined cornfield.
It will be in your sisters, their instruments transformed
across the world. In the international pollen
the mountain’s sudden conversion
into birds and serpents and women and hard thunder.
.
* pueblo means village – also people
_____
El triunfo del pueblo emanará de una rama rota,
en un paisaje de yegua herida y un maizal trastornado.
Estará en tus hermanas, sus instrumentos renovados
a través del mundo, en el polen internacional
las montañas que de repente se convierten
en aves y serpientes y mujeres y relámpagos duros.
_____
Juan Felipe Herrera was born in 1948 in California
to parents who were migrant farm-workers.
A Chicano poet, he has been writing for 40 years,
freely combining Spanish and English.
He has been described as “a factory of hybridity”
and “an eclectic virtuoso”.
_
In these two poems Herrera speaks in the voices
of a Mayan mother, Pascuala (“The pueblo’s triumph…”) and her
daughter Makal (“Morning opens…”)
Herrera’s poem-story, Thunderweavers/Tejedoras de rayos (2000),
is an homage to the Mayan people of Acteal, Chiapas, México,
where paramilitaries massacred townsfolk in 1997.
Zócalo Poets 