The Poetry Center at Smith College



	Poems by Claribel Alegría Accounting Flowers from the Volcano Little Cambray Tamales		Flowers from the Volcano Fourteen volcanos rise in my remembered country in my mythical country. Fourteen volcanos of foliage and stone where strange clouds hold back the screech of a homeless bird. Who said that my country was green? It is more red, more gray, more violent: Izalco roars, taking more lives. Eternal Chacmol collects blood, the gray orphans the volcano spitting bright lava and the dead guerrillero and the thousand betrayed faces, the children who are watching so they can tell of it. Not one kingdom was left us. One by one they fell through all the Americas. Steel rang in palaces, in the streets, in the forests and the centaurs sacked the temple. Gold disappeared and continues to disappear on yanqui ships, the golden coffee mixed with blood. The priest flees screaming in the middle of the night he calls his followers and they open the guerrilleros chest so as to offer the Chac his smoking heart. No one believes in Izalco that Tlaloc is dead despite television, refrigerators, Toyotas. The cycle is closing, strange the volcano's silence since it last drew breath. Central America trembled, Managua collapsed. In Guatemala the earth sank Hurricane Fifi flattened Honduras. They say the yanquis turned it away, that it was moving towards Florida and they forced it back. The golden coffee is unloaded in New York where they roast it, grind it can it and give it a price. Siete de Junio noche fatal bailando el tango la capital. From the shadowed terraces San Salvador's volcano rises. Two-story mansions protected by walls four meters high march up its flanks each with railings and gardens, roses from England and dwarf araucarias, Uruguayan pines. Farther up, in the crater within the crater's walls live peasant families who cultivate flowers their children can sell. The cycle is closing, Cuscatlecan flowers thrive in volcanic ash, they grow strong, tall, brilliant. The volcano's children flow down like lava with their bouquets of flowers, like roots they meander like rivers the cycle is closing. The owners of two-story houses protected from thieves by walls peer from their balconies and they see the red waves descending and they drown their fears in whiskey. They are only children in rags with flowers from the volcano, with Jacintos and Pascuas and Mulatas but the wave is swelling, today's Chacmol still wants blood, the cycle is closing, Tlaloc is not dead. Translated from the Spanish by Carolyn Forche From FLOWERS FROM THE VOLCANO (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982)