I search on the hidden face of the moon
for the sadness my mother left on my temples
every time she kissed me missing me already,
and the steady hands with which I gambled
an enviable future for this American world.
A memory of my beginning shapes into a fist.
Our home in the country crumbled long ago.
I imagined I could return to the pine trees
my father planted, swim in the same sea
tinted the color of Homeric wine at sunset.
At every meal, saffron threads bonded us,
colored filaments my mother toasted inside
a white folded paper next to the fire
between two unknowns—one here today
the other when I left all the rice behind.
Outside the window a local bird sings.
I speak to it in one tongue, dream in another
dressed with the garb of the beloved place
of no return, the voice of my mother gone,
my father’s brow consumed by loneliness.
I long for the blank page of the moon
to write a song under swaying Aleppo trees,
the sharp breeze disinterring the cadence
of my language; anoint myself with olive oil.
pero yo ya no soy yo, ni mi casa es ya mi casa. *
* “…but I am not who I was, and my house is no longer my home.”
”Romance Sonámbulo,” Garcia Lorca.
