Sub silentio
I
Noon.
Within the reaches of a highway
signposts turn to me and point:
"Regard a century that stumbles
into a present fooled by toady goons."
Thus farmers live in glitzy towns,
prefer the screech of motorbikes
and blindaged 4 x 4's that hit
the road to Buenos Aires in a day.
Propelled through hostile plains
men at the wheel feel safer,
mobile phones in hand,
chattering about some future gains.
I hear a signpost say: "Upstarts profess
to anoint this land
with techno mimicking progress."
II
Another post, bent by unstilled winds,
waves its deprecated desert cap
and spits from lipless mouth:
"See the locks for water storage
regulate uncanny mirrors of the sky,
see the sky squeezed
into a mirage of silent apathy,
hear its death rattle
... rattle rattle rattle
see it hide its face
in the confines of foreclosed space."
III
Then I perceive
shy water-sprites take leave
of springs reduced to runlets,
of dried-up fountains, of magic,
I hear wood nymphs fret
by torrents subdued in concrete flanks,
sources of power
for the metropolis agonizing on mudbanks
of a lion's mouth to the Atlantic.
I smell the mouth of the lion
redolent with litter,
I see it coughing under the skyline
of a city eaten smooth,
timeserving,
one that never understood the poetry
of water nor rock nor blue lagoon.
IV
Oh, if I could swim beneath the mirrors
that entombed those plains 'midst rolling hills,
my tears would pierce the casements
of underwater museums,
I'd say farewell to ritual glades,
to chthonian shrines and graveyards,
to adobe homes 'neath shrouds of algae,
the kind that chokes fresh forms of life.
I'd pay homage to the a๋rial spirits
my sentiment revisits,
murmur lunar incantations
of a culture scythed to its roots
by improbity blinking cold eyes
over the blood monies of nations.
IV
And then the spreading of the shadows.
Sub silentio.
On a solitary signpost, near death of day,
a songbird stares,
too weak to warble,
and the fair child has long gone away.
From "Patagonia Lost", unedited collection.
Copyright Sylvia Maclagan, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2004.
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~Mosaic Musings Staff
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