Rio Grande de Loiza! - Julia de Burgos

Rio Grande de Loiza!... Elongate yourself in my spirit

and let my soul lose itself in your rivulets,

finding the fountain that robbed you as a child

and in a crazed impulse returned you to the path.

Coil yourself upon my lips and let me drink you,

to feel you mine for a brief moment,

to hide you from the world and hide you in yourself,

to hear astonished voices in the mouth of the wind.

Dismount for a moment from the loin of the earth,

and search for the intimate secret in my desires;

confuse yourself in the flight of my bird fantasy,

and leave a rose of water in my dreams.

Rio Grande de Loiza!... My wellspring, my river

since the maternal petal lifted me to the world;

my pale desires came down in you from the craggy hills

to find new furrows;

and my childhood was all a poem in the river,

and a river in the poem of my first dreams.

Adolescence arrived. Life surprised me

pinned to the widest part of your eternal voyage;

and I was yours a thousand times, and in a beautiful romance

you awoke my soul and kissed my body.

Were did you take the waters that bathed

my body in a sun blossom recently opened?

Who knows on what remote Mediterranean shore

some faun shall be possessing me!

Who knows in what rainfall of what far land

I shall be spilling to open new furrows;

or perhaps, tired of biting hearts

I shall be freezing in icicles!

Rio Grande de Loiza!... Blue. Brown. Red.

Blue mirror, fallen piece of blue sky;

naked white flesh that turns black

each time the night enters your bed;

red stripe of blood, when the rain falls

in torrents and the hills vomit their mud.

Man river, but man with the purity of river,

because you give your blue soul when you give your blue kiss.

Most sovereign river mine. Man river. The only man

who has kissed my soul upon kissing my body.

Rio Grande de Loiza!... Great river. Great flood of tears.

The greatest of all our island’s tears

save those greater that come from the eyes

of my soul for my enslaved people.

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Julia de Burgos [Julia Constanza Burgos Garcia] (1914 – 1953) Puerto Rico

Translated by Jack Agüeros

Source: Spanish Poetry