When your whole world feels like a dull shadow of what it once was, an undercurrent of menace and sadness leaves you with a sense of dread. Rage builds up, filling you with a frenzy to act or sending you into a deep reverie of sorrow. What if it does all of that at once? A poetic exercise by Eliana Otta.
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Untitled
From the window we see the crane
bringing the expected progress
to the neighborhood
unaware of us too
becoming soon
rotten wood and rusty metal
waiting our turn to be picked up
and exchanged for
a shiny and lustrous something.
Progress always breaks its promises.
The voices foretelling its treason
speak in too simple words
to be understood.
The next prophecies need different languages
impertinent gestures
unclassifiable substances and matters
not those indebted to the mind and calculation
other
smelly, even stinky ones,
changing temperatures and rhythms
jazzy, tropical, pentatonic, bizarrely DIY
gifted in fooling the orchestrated jaws
of hungry machinery
and the insistent parades of endless zeros.
Until then
when you fear that your destiny
is in the hands of fascists
focus on the present
and let’s meet
here.
Realpolitik
All this time
focused
on imagining,
discussing
even
rehearsing
complex,
different,
fair
ways
of practicing politics.
When really
all we needed to do
was to focus
on preventing
our children
from being killed
from being raped
from being prevented
to live enough
as to reach a time
when they could
gather
to focus
on imagining,
discussing
even rehearsing
complex,
different,
fair
ways
of practicing politics.
On reciprocity under neoliberalism
We said we don’t want power
First, we thought about it
Then we dared to say it
First, we murmured it
Then we dared to scream it
We thought seriously about it
And repeated several times
We don’t want power
We don’t want power
We don’t want power
In written
Oral
Embodied
Ways
We don’t want power
We don’t want power
We don’t want power
In diverse tones and languages
Dialects and slangs
With academic jargons
With paintings and sculptures
And shouting in the streets
We don’t want power
We don’t want power
We don’t want power
And also
We don’t want to want power
We don’t want to want power
We don’t want to want power
Until suddenly
we heard power’s reply:
I never wanted you
To begin with.
We filled in the forms
We have all the paperwork
Our paperwork is in order
We have everything
A registered office and a president
We hold elections
and elect a president every three years
We have bylaws and legal representation
A registered association
We are in dialogue with the municipality
We pay our dues and have no debts
We pay
We always pay
We are organized
They want to kick us out.
But we have all the paperwork
everything in order.
All of it.
Office and president.
They want to kick us out.
Although we are legal.
They want to kick us out.
We have an appointment
at the municipality
We will show them the paperwork.
Payments up to date.
So, they won’t kick us out.
They can’t kick us out.
This democracy
Esta democracia ya no es democracia
Esta democracia ya no es democracia
Dina asesina, el pueblo te repudia
Dina asesina, el pueblo te repudia
Assassin Dina
people despise you.
This translation
doesn’t manage to transmit
the embodied act
of voicing our rage.
Despise you does not convey
the Spanish word ‘repudia’
so much used those days.
Neither does the word ‘hate.’
We did hate her.
We did despise her.
But actually,
we repudiábamos her.
Try it out loud.
Say hate
say despise
you need to raise your voice
to make them sound expressive
to grant them coherence.
Repudia instead
offers you from the beginning
the intensity of the Spanish ‘r.’
Try it out loud, go ahead.
It should sound as the r in rat
which by the way is a word
we used a lot those days too
and actually, in the last decades
very often, too often
to name the congressmen.
With the excuse of the rats,
I always say.
So, try it properly: repudia.
After the intense rrrr
you have the p in ‘pu’
to gesture against her
with renewed scorn.
El pueblo te repudia.
You know what el pueblo is.
The people.
It is you, it is me.
El pueblo te repudia.
Say it out loud.
Practice it.
Until it comes fully charged
intoxicated with fury
powerful out of your mouth
and from others’.
Take it.
Teach it.
Use it when needed.
We are busy discussing books
While our enemies
are busy burning them.
We don’t want to call them enemies.
We don’t want to think we have enemies
we want to believe in humanity.
But humanity never existed
it is a word they invented
to create its opposite.
They needed worlds to dehumanize
especially those without distinction
between human and not human.
After spreading the word
they taught us to read their books.
Now that we write our own
they decide to burn it all.
Untitled
Poetry is best known
for being the ultimate way
of befriending
the love experience
with language.
For me it is an enraged refugee
where I can ponder
what to write instead of the word kill
how to cross out revenge
and highlight justice
let the blank page to be transformed
into a place where love can be again.