A woman is alone - Aída Cartagena Portalatín

A woman is alone.
Alone with her stature. With her open eyes. With her open arms. With her heart open like a wide silence.
She waits in the desperate and despairing night without losing hope. She thinks she is in the flagship with the saddest light of creation.
Already she has hoisted her sails and let herself be carried by the North wind in accelerated flight before the eyes of love.

A woman is alone.
She holds her dreams fast with dreams, the dreams that remain to her, and all the sky of the Antilles.
Solemn and quiet before the world that is a human stone, in motion, adrift, lost in the sense of its own word, its useless word.

A woman is alone.
She thinks that now everything is nothing and no one says anything from the party to the mourning about the blood that leaps, about the blood that runs about the blood that is born or dies of death.
Nobody comes forward to offer her a dress to clothe her voice that sobs naked, spelling itself.

A woman is alone.
She feels, and her truth drowns—in thoughts that translate the beauty of the rose, of the star, of love, of man and of God.

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Aída Cartagena Portalatín (1918 - 1994) Dominican Republic
Translated by Judith Kerman
Source: BOA Editions