how long
does the sea take
the northern sun
lies low
on the 25th May
I belong
to a republic
which Artigas
and the Thirty-three
did not found
long shadows
always fall
across the beach
sky takes over
from the sea
we face the south
and cannot reach it
I sang
the caiman Styx
the Rio Negro
breathed on
like a mirror
I am quicksilver
where the glass reflects -
death is just
a surface
and I’m not gone
put me
in earth’s
light summer dress
so my body
feels the sensitive grass
without me
I want sun
to heat
the bones of flowers
Antarctic rain
to clothe me
we’ve had our share
of liberators -
Leviathan
keeps turning up
out of the sea
Behemoth charges
and grazes his herds
on the land
wind is the bird
that fills the sky
yes and east
of our easterly
republic
Maldoror founded
a republic
fit for sharks
Blackwell’s
Oxford
10 February 2018
The Oriental Republic of Uruguay was home to the poet Juana Fernandez Morales de Ibarbourou (1892-1979). Maldoror is well known to those who know the work of the so-called comte de Lautreamont, the pseudonym of the Uruguay-born Isidore-Lucien Ducasse (1846-70) who wrote “Les Chants de Maldoror”.
I do not paraphrase or quote anything from the verse of Juana de Ibarbourou in this poem. It is all my own, so to speak ; - but she did write a famous poem in which she did request burial close to the ground surface, rather than interment in the kind of necropolis, for which the region of the River Plate is famous. She was a pantheist.
The flag of Uruguay features the same sun of the 25th May 1810 as the Argentine flag in acknowledgement of the May Revolution in the River Plate. Jose Gervasio Artigas (1764-1850) was the founder of the Uruguayan nation. Jose Antonio Lavalleja ( 1784-1853) led the revolt of the ” Thirty-three Orientals” ( or Easterners) against rule by the Brazilian Empire in 1825.
In New Zealand English, to say you have had ” your share” of something, is a modest self deprecatory comment, whether of enjoying good fortune or enduring trouble, and not the negative comment, it might be in other varieties of English.