Freedom

Yesterday was Mexican Independence Day and I walked to my Mexican friends' flat in the wind and the rain and climbed the stairs and ate flan and drank rather a lot of tequila with five humans and two beloved guinea pigs--the pigs, refraining from the liquor, ate strange woody pellets instead... And I am sure that the evening's conversation turned political at times, but since those times were in Spanish, which I don't speak, I couldn't follow, but this morning I dragged out this poem I post below, written by Vidal de Nicolas, once a political prisoner in Burgos jail--in Argentina, maybe? Clearly, I should turn to someone else's words this morning, and these are words that ring in the heart for a long time after...

A Wish

That son of Cain, let him have no more power
to loose his fury on the unfettered spring
or deal death to the kiss.
Let hatred be restrained from flooding
the pristine margins of the air.
Let knives become impotent against swallows, and the assassin
powerless to garrotte the dawn.
May war never again
batter the skulls of newborn babes, or sever
the exultant arteries of a man.
Let poisoned fangs and pistols
and slavering jaws be done away,
and nevermore let frenzy lash us
with its insensate waves.

Let nothing remain but a love
as vast as all the oceans,
pouring like a cataract across the pupils
of our eyes, flooding the planets,
filling the songs of poets everywhere.

And here is a kingfisher, for it was high time one turned up here--and may birds like this tiny malachite kingfisher in my cousin's hand live long lives full of fish and sparkling water...