Luz Machado

Born 1916 in Ciudad Bolívar, on the Orinoco river; since 1941 has lived in Caracas.  Contributor to the country's most important newspapers, active in cultural organizations, and has been Venezuela's cultural attaché in Chile.  Poetry collections: Ronda, 1941; Variaciones en Tono de Amor, 1943; Vaso de Resplandor, 1946; La Espiga Amarga, 1950; Canto al Orinoco, 1953; Sonetos Nobles y Sentimentales, 1956; La Casa por Dentro, 1965; Poemas Sueltos, 1965; Sonetos a la Sombra de Sor Juana de la Cruz, 1966; La Ciudad Instantanea, 1969; Soneterío, 1972; Palabra de Honor, 1973; Retratos y Tormentos, 1973; Poemas de Luz Machado (anthology), 1986; A Sol y Sombra, 1992.

Spanish Text

SERVITUDE AND REST

The mistress arranges her household material,
counts the ascending order of the fruits,
scatters on the table the blue mushrooms of cups
- their golden cavities of indifference
their fine hemispheres smeared with colour
like the spring -
the glasses trained by fire,
the monograms of coffee and the childish
letters of milk,
the metallic husk that parches
the contrasting moods in vegetables,
the common agreements of flour,
sun of oil, moons of vinegar,
sugar chokers on the neck of fruits
and salt bodkins
for the deadly sin of spices.

After, between sheets on her bed she lies
like a ship revealed in the night by beams.
Her lily remains.
She adds up paradises and feels divided
like a broken star.
On the pillows she slowly leaves her eyes,
her forehead, her hair
and her breath,
which at each dawn lifts her blood
as if it was raising
a big red house.

 

GARLIC

Garlic clenches its fist,
its white smelly fist that was gloved by dragonflies
unborn.
But when it reaches my house
and I bare its halfmoons of smell
and burst its tiny maddened dovecote,
garlic yells for all the time it was hidden.

Then it finds out
how short-lived freedom is on earth.

 

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