“I’ve carded wool from what caught
and filled the larder with fallen crumb”
—Luisa A. Igloria, “Border Studies 17”
We sought the truth
in magazines and Facebook quizzes.
We tried the self-improvement regimens
of every friend and celebrity.
We earned one degree and then another,
and finally, the terminal one.
We bought the houses, the cars,
all the products aimed at the heart’s hole.
Is it too late to learn
the truth? The heart yearns
to explore an alien sea
or dive to depths far below the keel.
We take our lessons from the Celts.
We set sail in tiny
boats that may not long repel
the water. We take one oar,
a loaf of bread, and a cup
to collect rain water.
We will go where the wind
hauls us, and we will stake
our claim upon a different shore,
a larder stocked
with supplies we do not know
we need.
Paraguayan poet Ricardo Mazó (1927-1987) worked as an engineer and geologist. He is regarded as one of the Promoción del 50, a group of 1950’s poets, mainly from the Academia Universitaria and the Faculty of Philosophy in Asunción, who wrote socially engaged poetry during Alfredo Stroessner’s dictatorship (1954–1989). Briznas: suerte de antología (Scraps: A Kind of Anthology), 1982, gathers together 73 poems written between the years 1940 and 1980. Solitude, absence, nostalgia, distance, boredom, as well as a constant search for the self, a recurrent encounter with time, and fixation on an unceasing memory, are the dominant motifs of his poetry. He’s also known for his Spanish translation of Hegel’s Introduction to Aesthetics. (Cribbed from the Wikipedia. 