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 à 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. . .

Setu, July 2017