Selected Poems of Juan Gelman
 translated by Hardie St. Martin

Alone

you’re alone / my country / without
the comrades you lock up and destroy / you hear
them slowly being emptied of the love
they have left / they loosen their grip
on their turn to die / dream they’re being dreamed / quieted /
they’ll never see other faces growing /
leaning out / continued / in this sun /
some day in the sun of justice

Selected Poems of Juan Gelman
 translated by Hardie St. Martin

Quiet at Last

quiet at last / so terribly alone / without kisses / my comrades
think me night after night / they toss and turn
unable to sleep / restless under sheets
of earth or water where they’re going away /

gone / eaten away by the truth / i toss and turn /
around this shame like a wing / fly
little bird / fly / my son’s face in the middle
of my woman or loneliness / pull away /

i’m burning with the fire you burn
lowered / comrades / or neighborhoods of fire
my soul passed through like a voice
walking now with the world’s feet

 to Juan Carlos Cedrón

Selected Poems of Juan Gelman
 translated by Hardie St. Martin

If Gently

if waves from someone who threw himself into the sea
came to mind gently / what about our brothers who were
in-earthed? / do leaves sprout from their fingers? /
saplings / autumns
soundlessly losing their leaves? / silently

our brothers talk about the time when
they were twothree inches away from death / they smile
remembering / even now feeling their relief
as if they hadn’t died / as if

paco were still brilliant and rodolfo were looking
up all the lost thoughts he’d always carried
slung over his shoulder / or rodolfo (forever) digging through
his bitterness
had just pulled out the ace of spades / he turned his mouth to the
wind /
inhaled life / lives / saw with his own eyes the angel of death /
but now they’re talking about when
things worked out / nobody killed / nobody got killed /
they outwitted the enemy making up for some of the general
humiliation/
with brave actions / with dreams / and all this time
their companions lying there / wordless /
flesh falling from their bones on a january night /
quiet at last / so terribly alone / without kisses

Selected Poems of Juan Gelman
 translated by Hardie St. Martin

On the Soul Begins to Hurt

Early on the soul begins to hurt / pale /
in the wavering light it explores your not being here /
the heart rises with misgivings /
goes over the sky like the sun

in daylong search / day in day out / it burns
freezing / as if its bones thrown out
of joint / or like an unsaid word
where i try to march against death /

soul you harmonize harmonies that barely
make it across the world’s width /
broken / it broods over
what you left me / night on its feet

on August 25, 1976
my son marcelo ariel and
his pregnant wife claudia
were kidnapped in
buenos aires by a
military commando,
like in tens of thousands
of other cases, the military
dictatorship never officially
acknowledged these who
“disappeared,” it referred to
“those absent forever.”
until i see their bodies
or their killers, i’ll never
give them up for dead.