Poems to the Wounded

Julliano Lopes
1#
I am pregnant with different people.
If you look close to my skin,
you can see men and women
in my pores.
Their eyes have seen things
I can't name.
Their ears have listened to the music
of the oceans.
They are in me and I condemned them
to be my voice.



2#
Deep inside of me, there is a book
I read night after night hidden
in my bedroom when the stars
were my sisters. That book was my love
and my lover. I used to hug it but
not before making love to each letter,
each word, each page.
I stole it from a library when
books were whims of the insane.
That book grew into me like a tree
in a time of discovery and despair.
Whenever I look back I am more aware
that I didn't steal that book.
It was the book that stole my soul.



3#
I spent eighty-four months of my life,
only studying the History of my own country.
( it was as if everybody was in exile:
from Plato up to Roosevelt)
but it was us that were in exile.
I stared at my History teachers with disdain
as I repeated the same dusty names and dates
shaking my legs nervously, enumerating space.
Sometimes I thought their tongues were cut off
long before they could teach us how to think.
Then, little by little I started to pity them:
they were half winged scared beings.
I could see their hearts dying under a defibrillator
as they rehearsed the same old scripts.
When I left high school, I was free to love History
and contemplate it without my prayers and curses.
But now that I am old, I understand my teachers:
They are the proof of dictatorship's obscenity.

Karla Bardanza

Copyright©Karla Bardanza 2012 Photobucket

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