Silence Near An Ancient Stone
by Rosario Castellanos

I’m a woman sitting here with all my words intact
like a basket of green fruit.

The fragments
of a thousand ancient and defeated gods
seek and bind each other in my blood, straining
to rebuild their statue.
From their shattered mouths
a song struggles to rise to mine,
an aroma of burnt resin, some gesture
of a mysterious carved stone.
But I am oblivion, betrayal,
the shell that did not hold an echo
from even the smallest wave in the sea.
I do not watch the submerged temples;
I watch only the trees moving their vast shadows
over the ruins, biting the passing wind
with acid teeth.
And the signs close beneath my eyes like
a flower under the awkward fingers of the blind.
Yet I know: behind
my body another body crouches,
and around me many breaths
cross furtively
like nocturnal animals in the jungle.
I know that in some place,
like cactus in the desert,
a clustered heart of thorns, awaits a name
as the cactus does the rain.
But I know only a few words
in the language or the stone
beneath which they buried my ancestor alive.