Poetry: Maria Farazdel

Maria Farazdel

Maria Farazdel (Palitachi)



The beast

“I’d be so lucky to write
for the people.”
 Antonio Machado

There’s a cursed train with a
One-way car to death
Where the poor climb on
Looking for a better cup of coffee

There’s a cursed train
That when it stops it steals dreams
That never existed
Dreams that not even have been slept
Leaving the memory empty

The narcos’ mules, the odorless,
The wayward people get on it
Suffering the pain of a rotten fossil
And the abandonment, like the “Leaf Storm”

There’s a cursed barefooted train
Filled with dull voices
Collecting the last breath
Poking in the rubble
Eyes toward the dying insomnia

On the death car
They’re ready to awaken realities
Mirroring sad truths
Mass suicide, killings and crimes
Without a reason
Invaders of happiness, life robbers
Kidnappings, deaths that do not fall off
Like a consuming addiction muzzled to evil

There’s a cursed train coming back
To collect deaths ├а la Basque
Taking them to the rubble of the West

Ending lives not yet born
Frightened children singing ring-around-the-rosy
Newborns defecating without being breast-fed
While the bugs between cars
Suck at them

The hanged travel between rows
Speaking of yonder which they’ve never seen
Stories of corruption
Becoming reality

What the hell is going on here?

The metal beast
Is passing through ghost towns
The meek allow themselves to be beaten
Mutating prisoners of their own skin
When foreign seas are sprinkled
With the fingerprints of terror

A place of missing crosses
Where the wind forces us to trot along

The border patrol arrests women
Mothers, girls, they use, they abuse them
They take hold of their fear

Cursed be the man who dumps beliefs
Inside the death car
Burning to ashes on the steppe of the probe

There’s no mercy or words
Everything went to the shit
Of the empty stable

These lives do not rack up
They can’t even live
To seize the day of mass suicide

How many roads were not taken?

Central America runs the road
Of the undocumented
Less than the many who return
In unmarked body bags
While others get lost in the rubble
Worse than the market’s whisper

They intended to make
Something else out of their lives
To sneak in by bolting to a better meal 

The Pass of the North
Spits them back with pins in their hair
Weaving the hidden pain

A wagon from South to North
With interest at the center, it should break
Tearing rooftops up in our towns

Because here in the distance the wind is a weapon
And the epiphanies walk in the dark
In pursuit of their shamans

There’s a cursed train
Cursed train with a car filled with unresolved lives
With no tracks to follow
Raping our spring flowers

I’ve been thinking that at times we’re that cursed train.



An Old Path

I
The noise wakes me up in a strange place
I trip over stones
I fall
I try to stand up, call someone,
I’m alone
Full of forgotten names

II
The war grows
They burn the ovaries without love, sleepless in the shadows
They carry everything they create

III
When I came back from my last funeral
I noticed that they’d never left my grave
Or theirs thoughts or their lonesome nights

Under this dry earth
Under these recently departed
There are dying bodies
That death shouldn’t have kept

I’d like to visit my last grave again

Earth fumes like Mt. Vesuvius

An animal is on the loose
Living in a fleeing world

IV
To revisit the old tomb,
To impregnate peace
To watch over it

Inadvertently, I visited
The last body I had inhabited
What good is it to go back?
What good is it to die so many deaths?
If they’ll never have my eyes.

Lonely between so many

“Someone enters death with the eyes wide open.”
                                              Alejandra Pizarnik

Tired of lying down
Of letting your nails and your beard grow

You’re tired of having your bones in the raw
Of not being able to see the spring on the trees
Of the poems traveling without being written
Of not being inhabited by caresses

Of being alone among many
Whom you don’t recognize or remember

Tired of my deaths and of the calendar
Of history insisting on shaking me

Tired of not being able to see who comes into the streets
Of whoever doesn’t buy bread and wine
Of not bidding farewell to the evenings
And of yelling that I still don’t live inside you

This morning, they vandalized my grave
And I woke up dead
From this death and who knows

From how many more. . .

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