Even Now

Las Hurdes

We know neither bread nor meat

We sleep on leaves that turn to compost for our stony land

Our houses have no windows

And in our village there are 14 dwarves and 30 idiots

It rains and our levees leak

It doesn’t rain We pray and our earth stays dry

Like our skin

Like our throats that swell and crack

He who is our father is our lover

And our mothers die young

Shame is our portion

Disgrace our daily meal

Our faces are rank with weeds

We look into your camera We are real

And you are right to say, “They are Las Hurdes.”

West Flanders

A gaunt song a dark thread

Land like a sheet

That sinks

Springtime land of milk and farms

Willow-wood children

Feverish summer land when the sun

Spawns its young in the corn

Golden enclosure

With the deaf-and-dumb farmers at their dead hearths

Praying to God to “forgive us

His trespasses against us”

With the fisherman burning in their boats

With the mottled animals the frothing women

Who sink

Land I dawn in you My eyes are shards

I am in Ithaca with holes in my skin

I borrow your air when I speak

Your bushes and lindens concealed in my words

My letters are West Flanders: dune and polder

I drown in you

Land you are a gong in my skull and at times

Later in ports

A conch: May and beetle Dark bright

Earth.

Bye

A morning like always your house is empty

We count and one by one the days

Step into the cage

One sees I see you see

The hidden animals in the cool mirror see

This keeps it buried

The knife that rusts the blood that clots

The bricks porous the milk sour

One says you say

With a blinded voice a frozen gesture

Bye

Bye dear children bye.