The first time I found Cafe Cafe was when the poem challenge was going on to write a poem titled El Culo de Bettie. I wasn't a member of the blog at that point, and didn't write a poem for the challenge then, but the notion hung around in my mind, and I finally decided to attempt one. Not for the previous challenge contest, obviously, but just to write one.
This is the most ambitious effort I've attempted writing in original Spanish. I'm not fluent by any means. If anyone spots any basic errors in grammar, etc., please feel free to point them out. This apart from anything else about the poem, of course. -- Thanks.
el culo de bettie
el culo de bettie — ¿dónde está?
the moon is a bull shouldered and grunting in the field.
el narciso tan rubio de valor.
touching the cup of the morning,
las manos de bettie, ¿por cuándo?
yesterday, tomorrow, i will see you, i have seen you,
fresca y azul — hace mucho tiempo.
tiny fireflies of ice
tocan las campanas del aire encendido.
in your eyes you offer secrets
de las olas ocultas del mar,
a dance of wind, the wings of your name.
baile conmigo me dices, ¡tan claro!
i call out to you and you are somewhere and sometime
y fuente de calor y puente de palabras.
the question of questions, who are you,
¿quién eres?, la misma de bettie tú misma,
you answer speaking dawnlight and nightfall,
caminando en aurora de cual y cualquiera,
moving my feet on the drum of the shifting earth,
sombra a sombra bettie el canto el susurro de tí,
shadow by shadow calling out your histories of light.
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3 comments:
Really a beautiful language. I can't read it or speak it, but I'd love to be able to speak it, even if I had no clue what I was saying let it roll off my tongue. Delicious. Beautiful poem.
Hey Lyle, nice poem! I'll come back to it.
About a dozen years ago I wrote one like this, in 13 line stanzas with alternating english & spanish lines, the shift being no code other than the end of the line. I liked it but kinda lost it, the poem, that is. It was several pages and still in process. Do you know of any other poem that does this? Thanks & thanks for your poem.
"Un-hovle B" (why am I the only one this thing talks to?)
Lorna, sometime back in the early 1980's Lawrence Ferlighetti wrote a book of poems, "Over All the Obscene Boundaries," published by New Directions, that includes a number of poems that begin in English and gradually shift into another language -- some into French, some into Italian, some into Spanish, I forget what else.
I've seen, of course, many individual poems over the years by various Latino/a poets in the U.S. who have written partly in English and partly in Spanish, though I don't specifically remember any offhand that alternated line by line.
Thanks for your comment.
Michelle, thanks much also.
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