A diez años de Acteal...

COAGULATED BLOOD

To The little girls of Oventic

I

That morning fog
is a sigh,
a moist secret

A blue flame
glinting in the women’s eyes
in the eyes of the men

Chiapas,
a fertile field
of green giants,
ladders decorated
with shiny ribbons
and bruised flesh


II

A little girl
climbs the frozen hill

From above she sees
a tide of soldiers
chopping the bodies
as if they were trees,
they hold
her silenced
empty heart
between their boots

Farther up
she knows
the brutal
blood-letting

The red trunks
of the Ceiba
are stumps now,
broken too,
uprooted

III

In a room
made of mud and wood
an old man dies

His feet are tracks
sewn of open wounds,
from this deaf land
his flesh was exiled
to the highlands

His shadow dances in the dark,
cut by the scissors
of a single candle

It calls forth the ancient ones
who own the wind,
the red jaguars
who follow the rains
and rivers

It calls for the spirit
embroidered by Moon,
a lonely memory
dying in the swamps
like his descendents


IV

Chiapas,
luminous
as the flowering zinacanteca
that surrounded by such green
lets its sparkle drop,
like the cleanly adorned tzeltal
that gazes profound and sad,
like the tzotzil suspended in midair
at the highest reach of mountain,
beaten by wool and cold

Upon what knife edge
do you harvest life?

Broken in the folds of the earth,
a defenseless woman surrounded by beasts,
your womb plundered in the thorns

Chiapas,
brilliant reflection
in eyes and lakes,
land darkened
by coagulated blood,
woman graceful
as fire,
as water.

Del libro Caldero de María Vázquez Valdez,

Ediciones Alforja, Mexico, 1999

Versión en inglés: Margaret Randall