1,169 words
Original in Spanish
Caribbean Sea.
Mare Nostrum.
The geological bite that the Atlantic Ocean gave us;
water semicircle that enters America and almost,
almost splits the continent in two;
Atlantic tongue that lengthens to the west beyond
the Antilles to form the blue Gulf of Mexico,
and stretches lower to the watershed wound in
deflowered Panama.
Mare Nostrum.
Sea that sleeps with America,
the immense reclining statue of woman,
and you encircle her,
and kiss her at the isthmus,
and on Colombian and Venezuelan coasts you
caress her wide thigh that curves toward
Atlantis from the light blue belt of Panama.
Sea that calms your pupils with the green waters
where equatorial stars of night bathe.
Sea that the ruby tropical sun,
from dawn to evening,
you promenade on your crystal tray,
and the blue mirror of the heavens reflects it,
and it seems to be navigating high above in sideral
space.
Sea of the thousand and one island,
on the face of the Antillean Archipelago.
Sea of pears and corals,
from the mystical treasure of the Great Bank
of the Bahamas to the madreporic nest
of the island Margarita.
Sea of the thousand and one pearls:
a thousand on the island, Margarita,
and one on Cuba,
the island pearl among the sumptuous stones of its
necklace.
Sea that guards,
among a ring of hurricanes,
the marvelous harem of your beloved Virgin
Islands that, always virgins, always sleep
with you.
Caribbean Sea:
that withdraws from the waves’ salt,
and climbs to the trunks of the coco palms
leaping on the microtrampolins of vegetable
fiber,
and reaches the fruitful clusters,
and your water sweetens
in the sweetwater coconuts
that rock on the palm tree hammock.
Sea of the world: in the smoke dreams of tobacco,
in the cane that drains into sugar,
in the golden amphora of the pineapple,
and in the fever and Bohemia and wakeful thirst
of the coffee.
Sea of yesterdays’ fierce Indians,
the Caribs,
the cannibals,
who in hundred-men pirogues,
assaulted tribes of other lands,
and robbed men and women,
and to the singsong of their ceremonies,
ate them in horrendous carnival.
Sea that incubates the nestfuls where cyclones are
born,
your tropical cyclones,
from which flee frightened planes and ships and
marines eagles;
your cyclones that rock cities,
and centenarian silk cotton trees uproot,
and hurl rocks from their heights,
and form their beds rivers overflow;
your cyclones that deafen you
on your waves and on your beaches,
as if at once your thousands and thousands
of marine shells resounded,
blown by thousands and thousands of your fish,
in infernal war din. . .
Sea that one day nevertheless fell asleep like a
child in the innocence of the cradle,
sweetly, and stayed quiet and mute, an oil
lamp before the cross, at seeing three
Columbian ships cut through you with
their immortal keels, aimed at the
green-blue isle of Guanahani.
Caribbean Sea:
green sea hallucinating
the hidalgo Don Juan Ponce de León,
took him with his men and ships,
from the Puerto Rico Eden
to the Eden of Florida,
in search of the dreamed fountain
to regain his already lost youth.
Sea that gave the Hispanic lions
the fantastic garden of Hispaniola,
the Preeminent,
that was cradle and mother and breast in the
conquest of the golden continent,
and that now is all a tomb,
island, Jerusalem of the New World,
all of it an immense cathedral
that watches over the relics of Columbus.
Sea that saw Vasco Núñez de Balboa and his epic
soldiers near the Central American coasts
with their ships;
and also saw them when, they themselves, in
Panamanian forests, transporting a great
cargo, bearing it on the strip of America,
over the tropical forest;
and your eyes also saw that the cargo were
the ships, changed that way into planes
that flew from your waters to the waters
of the then ignored Pacific sea, that Balboa
with his deed succeeded thus in discovering
and conquering.
Sea that guards history’s most glorious ashes,
for on your waves ascended the blaze,
that incessant blaze,
that aromatized all space and lit all the earth,
when bold Hernán Cortés attained the never before
nor since seen or heart of arrogance
of ordering ships burned, under the tragic
dilemma of dying or conquering.
Sea of burning beaches of adventures and heroisms.
Your beaches in Colombia and Venezuela that
yesterday saw Bolivar’s galloping horse,
that still gallops on the shield of his nation
toward the peak he chose, running away
towards the Andes and the plains.
Sea of the most errant piracy,
that romantic histories tell
of corsairs and pirates
who, in intrepid boarding, at dagger thrusts, stole
treasures,
that from Mexico and Cuba and Central and South
America
toward Europe, the pacific transatlantic vessels
conveyed;
treasures of gold and gems
they buried in mysterious places
and the avid eye of restless
popular fantasy still searches.
Rebellious sea,
of revolutionary waves
that rise against the wind in rebellion.
Sea of islands, forgers
of the most vigorous colonial rebelliousness;
those of Duarte and Luperon and Toussaint de
Louverture in Hispaniola;
the one plotted by the Golden Arm with Parrilla and
The Woodsman in Puerto Rico;
and the most impetuous of all,
the glorious rebellion of the Cubans, with Martí
and Máximo Gómez and Maceo, who in
siege of an island, without other arms than
the machete, fought the greatest of armies
that the Iberian Lion brought to the New
World from Spain.
Mare Nostrum, sea that harangues,
with versicles pregnant with future,
your islands
and the lands that amorous surround you;
and say to them:
Hold fast, my riparian nations,
in my waters’ provident municipality;
be in me, all in one;
go one to the other,
in the obol of the fields and in the obol of the
factories,
through my crystal pampa’s multiple roads;
and the same science learn;
and the same art create;
and the same seed amass;
and the same salt eat;
and the same water drink:
for my pitcher is by immutable laws
your immortal pitcher!
Sea that still feels colonial pain,
and choleric, hurls epithets of lightning and
thunder
when you see raised on your islands
exotic flags proclaiming
that you are not our sea.
But you are.
Ours, ours,
from the drowsy crater of Martinique
to the crypt in Nicaragua where the nightingale
sleeps;
ours, ours,
in the luxury of your starry nights,
in the force of your rain and your cyclone,
in the sun that warms you,
and in the depths of your waters where your
kingfish, the shark, rules;
and you are, in your Tropic of Cancer’s invisible
cables, with which you tie, from the Andean
range, the extended and wide and long blue
tail of your shawl.
You are ours, Mare Nostrum:
for to all our nations,
so they may pray for peace and union,
you offer the rosary of your islands,
from which the prayer flies in letanies,
the prayer the New World prays to God,
prostrated before Colombus’ tomb.
–translation by Theresa Ortiz de Hadjopoulos in «Luis Llorens Torres: A Study of His Poetry», ISBN 0-915534-44-4
Antillanismos 