BIO
Maritza Luza Castillo is a Peruvian writer and journalist with experience in radio, television, and the printed medium. She lives in Lima and is a member of the Peruvian Society of Poets and the Society of Poets World-Wide. Her poems and short stories have been widely published and garnered prizes. Two recent anthologies with her texts are “Venus de noche,” at Rubeo Publishers, and one published by Ediciones Con Talento.
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BIO
Margaret Saine was born in Germany and lives in Southern California, where she taught Spanish. She writes poetry and short stories in five languages, and regularly translates other poets. She has written prefaces for seven books of poetry. Her books in English are “Bodyscapes,” “Words of Art,” and 5 haiku chapbooks, plus several poetry mss. to be published: “Reading Your Lips”; “The Five Senses: Erotic Poems in Alphabetical Order”; “A Love in Winter”; and “Music of Reflected Light: Water Poems.” She is currently working on a volume of ekphrastic poems about music, art, and literature. In 2015 she published her Postwar childhood memoir “Ungeschicktes Kind” [Awkward Child] and a book of poems, “Das Flüchtige bleibt” [The Ephemeral Remains] in Germany. Her poetry has also appeared in Italy, France, Chile, Mexico, Jordania, India, and the Philippines. Margaret Saine is an editor of the California Poetry Quarterly, called CQ.
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*Maritza Luza Castillo’s poems are translated from original Spanish into English by Margaret Saine.
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SI ME SENTÍAS
Si me sentías,
Cierra los ojos
Y búscame sin ellos.
Llévalos castos
al encuentro
con la bruma.
Allí dormía;
en cada estrella que descubre
tu pupila.
Si me sentías
En qué lecho duermen mis versos.
Versos escritos a dos plumas
Y entre besos.
¿Dónde dormían?
Sí fueron hechos sobre los labios
de la luna.
Hoy tu presencia me tocó a oscuras
como esas galimatías que gastas
cuando las manos
sufren vacías
Manos que añoran la rutina
Y se rebelan contra toda lejanía.
Aun fermenta tu fragancia la soledad,
Curva invidente
Por donde discurre
El que nunca
Supo amar la pureza
De un alma sin aroma pestilente.
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IF YOU HAVE FELT ME
If you have felt me,
close your eyes
and look for me without them.
Take them pure
to the encounter
with the mist.
There I slept;
in each star that revealed
your pupil.
If you have felt me,
in what bed sleep my poems?
Poems written with two pens
and between kisses.
¿Where were they sleeping?
They were surely made on the lips
of the moon.
Today your presence touched me in the dark
like that double talk you think up
when your hands
suffer from emptiness,
hands that miss the routine
And rebel against any absence.
Solitude still ferments your aroma,
a blind curve
through which translire the reasons
of one who never
knew how to love the purity
of a soul without any pestilent aroma.
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TÚ PRIMERO
Puedo regresar a casa,
Y a un orden cómplice
por deshojarme,
como si el anhelo hubiese sido verte
y encontrarte
entre los vocablos de la noche.
Cuantas veces
me asomé a tu piel
desnuda,
y en incondicional sumisión,
sufrí el embate del amor desistido,
y fui la amante
de un cadáver dimitido.
De un sol que cambia sus vestiduras
por brillantes de ambigua valía.
También me aguarda
tu extrañar,
tu echadura de menos,
tu señal en la frente,
hecha
todos los días
delante de los vecinos,
como de tu agobiado amor propio,
difunto para mi alma
harta de ser la siguiente,
después de tu autoestima.
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YOU FIRST
I can return home,
and to a complicit order
to shed my petals
as if the yearning had been to see you
and meet you,
among the words of the night.
How many times
did I bend towards your skin
naked,
and in unconditional submission
suffered the blow of a love relented,
was the lover
of a resigned cadaver.
Of a sun that changes its vestments
for diamonds of dubious value.
And then I have to contend with
your grieving for things lost,
your pining away,
the sign on your head
made every day to the neighbors,
and also your weary egotism,
deadening my soul
which is fed up with always being second
after your self-esteem.
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HABLA DE MÍ
Habla de mí
Y de todas las identidades
que forja el corazón
para llegar a ti.
Habla de la mujer,
y de esta espesa niebla
que envejece los ojos,
pero no el alma que brilla.
Anda,
Cuenta del mar
desgastando tus pupilas,
de las horas
en que la arena caliente
fue la pluma,
tornada en versos frescos.
En antojo de sordos
y videncia secreta de ciegos,
cuya claridad
de mi respiración,
son burbujas emergentes
de un cielo húmedo
y celeste.
Habla de mí.
¿No ves mis labios lacrados
con el hierro de la muerte,
y la hoguera del despojo?
Habla de esta luz,
Y de la oscuridad vista
desde tu frente,
que te enfunda en negro,
como si el horizonte
estuviera de duelo.
Aquí las mariposas crean la mañana,
Y el ocaso incinera
viejas ofensas.
Habla de mí
Grito abatido
Desde tu extendida garganta
Grita: ¡Vida!
Que yo he de venir
Incluida, entre el viento
y la lluvia.
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SPEAK ABOUT ME
Speak about me
and all the identities
the heart forges
to reach you.
Speak about the woman
and the thick fog
that ages the eyes,
but not the shining soul.
Go
tell about the sea
ruining your pupils,
about the hours
in which the warm sand
was like a pen
forming fresh verses.
Into the desire of the deaf
and the secret sight of the blind,
whose clarity
of my breath,
are bubbles emerging
from a humid and
celestial sky.
Speak about me.
¿Do you not see my lips sealed
with the iron of death,
and the fire of despoilment?
Speak of this light
and the darkness seen
from your forehead
that shrouds you in black,
as if the horizon
were in mourning.
Here the butterflies create the morning,
And sunset incinerates
old offenses.
Speak about me,
the downcast cry
from your extended throat
screams: Life!
That I must be
included, among the wind
and the rain.
*****
