BIO
Poet Bio: Jacques Viau Renaud (1941—1965) was born in Haiti and raised in the Dominican Republic following his father's exile in 1948. During the Dominican Revolution of 1965, he joined the rebel forces in support of ousted president Juan Bosch, fighting against the US backed dictatorship. He was killed in battle at age 23.
Translator Bio: Ariel Francisco is the author of A Sinking Ship is Still a Ship (Burrow Press, 2020) and All My Heroes Are Broke (C&R Press, 2017). A poet and translator born in the Bronx to Dominican and Guatemalan parents and raised in Miami, his work has been featured in The New Yorker, The New York City Ballet, The Academy of American Poets, The American Poetry Review, and elsewhere.
My homeland arose
My homeland arose from this mourning life
like a lone earthen breeze in the wastelands.
Dry air of the mountains
caresses our faces with the aroma of death
while hunger walks the path of man.
The dry earth split.
A hostile sky slings towards the sun
and the clouds.
Nothing falls.
The leaves on the trees abandon their green
going on naked
leaving the agonized trees to die.
The rivers become lethargic and tired
the birds flee
from dust exhaled by the earth
from aluminum and gold
from long hungers and widening thirst.
Like this my homeland emerged from this mourning life
with frayed pages and uncertain steps
like the dead bursting from their tomb,
distributing lots of silence to the landless peasants
sweating from anguish.
Life was doling out agony
man rose like a cactus
in the wastelands solitude
opening paths in the scarce grass
and abundant rocks.
Dust drowned the howling
and smothered the sores under the sun and sky
of this massacred land.