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Jesús Sepúlveda (Chile)

  • Poem 1: ​The Animal Hungers
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  • Poem 2: YAGE
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The Animal Hungers
 
 
The animal hungers
for light and strength
He hungers
 
Killing himself while hunting
Groaning
fatally and the last
 
Hunger springs
Sleepless
 
There are beasts without burden
that dance / grow fiery
They warily drink water
 
Famine distorts
Tea or sugar or bread
or fuel
or a tender hand?
 
The animal hungers
for goodness
 
The famished grow fat 
leaving scraps for neither him
nor her
who remained with her cubs
 
The animal hungers
Tramps through trenches
up slopes
Sets out
 
He rears up on both paws and ransacks a beehive
Spreads his wings and throws himself from a cliff
 
The animal hungers
when he moves with the flock
or sells his lungs, his eyes
his goodness, his fury
hang from meat hooks
 
There is no slaughterer without slaughterhouses
 
there is a journal. a story. a bus
and the barrio where he who writes grew up
 
There are massacres
 
Slaughterers dressed as generals in plastic aprons
or doctors in white coats
the chemists the priests enrobed
 
Or gold buttons / stripes
or suits
Bare-chested
or sweaty
 
When the animal hungers
Everything trembles
Books crumble
The earth quakes
 
Autumn flowers bloom in the gardenIn the gazebo unreal and necessary
the breeze rushes
people stroll by
 
Home is one
who smokes sitting in the patio of his house
or in a hotel
or silently waits in the corner of his infancy
or lingers outside
until they open the door
 
Hunger squeezes through crevices
Cuts grooves
Breathes
Climbs fences
Feeds
 
But the animal doesn’t wait
grows weak or devours
He is hungry
and cold
 
 
He doesn’t know how to live
with pain and anguish
but tries
 
He prepares tea / bathes
or doesn’t
 
He has had enough
 
Slurps
Dips his bread
 
Sits still a moment
 
 
Translated by Bill Rankin

YAGE
                                                                To Álvaro Leiva
 
 
We are crystals
What are we?
 
Encrusted pearls that clean the mind
Murky dregs of the stony terrain
Rocky pearls that pulse
 
A stormy river rushing through the mouth
and leaving the body
 
The silver serpent is a shadowy wake
Silhouettes of moving trunks and branches
 
In the depths aquatic roots
scrape with their fringes the flight of worms
launched from the dark
 
Little greenand purple snakes
 
The copper coil of the brain
unravels like a music box in silence
 
Mute pearls whose sharp eardrums
hear the hissing of arrows
 
What are we?
 
An invadinglight
a fugitive flash
that dazzles in the corner of the eye
the womb where fingers fumble and flex?
 
Or eyelids that open only to close again?
 
To see Time like an infinite mirror reflecting into itself
The same image
cubically cut up on every side
 
Drinka river
with mud and insects
 
Jump from the tunnel to the valley of clear things
Morning light
 
Apparition of bark like an alligator's back
The endless flux that thought embraces
What are we?
 
Fine crystals that must be cleaned
 
 
 
Translated by Bill Rankin

 
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Jesús Sepúlveda is the author of ten poetry collections and three books of essays, including his green anarchist manifesto The Garden of Peculiarities (2002), his book on Latin American poetry Poets on the Edge (2016), and his collected poems Poemas de un bárbaro (2013).  His third poetry collection Hotel Marconi (1998) was made into a film in Chile in 2009 and his first collection Lugar de origen (1987) remains a work representative of his generation growing up under Pinochet’s dictatorship. Sepúlveda’s work has been published in twenty countries and translated from Spanish into twelve languages, leading him to participate in many poetry festivals and readings throughout the world (Medellín, Granada, Struga, Chiapas, Bremen, Tabanan, Puerto Rico, Trois-Rivières, among others).  The Sylt Foundation sponsored him to be a writer-in-residence in South Africa in 2016 and Germany in 2018.  In summer 2019 Sepúlveda won first place in the state of Oregon’s Spanish poetry contest.  His other works include Correo negro (Buenos Aires, 2001), Escrivania (Mexico, 2003), Antiegótico (Viña del Mar, 2013), Secoya (New York, 2015), and Wirikuta (Puerto Rico, 2019).  Sepúlveda was born in Chile in 1967 and moved to Eugene, Oregon (USA) in 1995. He currently teaches at the University of Oregon. 

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