Claudia Lars
trans. by Philip Pardi
Two POEMS
My Refuge
It isn’t easy living in this hate-filled age
if we hide our purest splendor deep within,
and our soul’s keeper rejects, utterly,
the human call to kill.
Sinister forces extend their reach
while a few naked sins flash,
anything but elegant—
and yet my pot of geraniums radiates
its scented offering so gently
and those sky-chasing sparrows are still there
in the morning air.
Should I think death
is merely skeletons
or learn the bee’s history,
old as honey?
I’m not interested in Paris or Moscow
or the cities of Gringoland.
A village of neighbors without newspapers
keeps me from grief
and I discover the loving, rustic riches
of the Bethlehem to come.
Thinking of the Great Dream
To have lived through a June full of flowers.
To have found the richest hive of the honeybees.
To move toward my death still savoring
the taste of love, the taste of many loves.
The land where those who sow the land go hungry.
The land in which they’ll bury me: a good land.
Such a vegetable body! Such sandy eyes,
beneath both dark and pale shades of green.
Life will always and always be life: we carry
a tune we can’t forget into a place
where every one of us is everything.
This shadow dimming my window will become,
right there, before my very eyes, the new
morning, resplendent, and yet different.
Claudia Lars (pen name for Carmon Brannon) is one of El Salvador’s most treasured and beloved poets. Born in 1899 to a Salvadoran mother and an Irish-American father, Lars published fourteen books of poems and a volume of short stories. Since her death in 1974, two separate editions of selected poems and a two-volume edition of complete poems have been published in San Salvador.
Philip Pardi is the author of Meditations on Rising and Falling (Wisconsin, 2008), which won the Brittingham Poetry Prize and the Writers’ League of Texas Award for Poetry. His poems and translations have appeared in Seneca Review, Translation Review, Gettysburg Review, Best New Poets, and Introduction to the Prose Poem. He teaches at Bard College.