We enter the eighth month of the year dealing with Covid-19. We would have wanted to live all this time in a capsule, in a hyperbaric chamber, in hibernation, and go outside only when it all happened. But so many things have happened in the global village in these seven months… And what is life without the experience of everyday life, of what happens and happens to us.
No matter how isolated we were, we couldn’t be without hearing the beating of the world, the multiple stories, from the origin and spread of the new coronavirus and the follow-up to the health crisis, to the social effects of an African-American suffocation by a cop in Minneapolis. Isn’t that quite one story?
On the island we have not been oblivious to the events outside, but also inside things have happened. And for everything there are criteria and positions that cause dissequents and shocks when intolerance emerges, the voices that scream louder because they want to be the only ones heard, the ones who believe themselves to be bearers of the truth.
Word New wanted to share the expressions of a group of diverse voices to offer to its readers as a sample of the personal and collective experiences that have been lived in this peculiar and amazing leap year, this twenty-twenty turned quarent(en)a.
We have asked these people to tell us about their experiences in these seven months, how their days have elapsed, how they have faced the challenges, and what reading they make of what happened, what their ideas are about it.
Among these voices, some have wanted to express themselves with a poetic text, which is also valid.
The Plague
By Alexis Soto Ramirez
finally relented May
when the shadow reached almost the waist
in its beginning he grabbed the spoils of a winter
which turned out to be a fraud
without a miserable inch of snow
the fly abandoned its hiding place
that’s why we decided to go out and get flowers
as obeying what seemed to be an impostergable mandate
even in the midst of the much-sounding plague
the plague was and wouldn’t imagine
like our nightmares
however we plant flowers
for encouragement and shelter from bees
as if it didn’t matter more to the succumb
true is that the plague somewhat changed our customs
his imaginary part fulfilled many of our longings
his real part vehemently shook the chick
brought us humors of great nocivity
the plague disrupts the cardinality of the armchair
where immersed in this and other reflections we sleep
(in another time
cavilations like these caused the most beautiful strokes
distant and bright as a supernova)
cavilation was just a way back
about himself
a way to balance an interior space
that forbade us to sow those flowers
for insect soiege
at this point it’s time to talk about the bird
its semiotic material comes from the air
and his wonder is both pride and secret bragging about the trees
the bird is a complex engine that orders the chasms
the abyss and the bird
also the mute
demarcate the limits that for man
should have been static
but something didn’t work in due course
and the border that the bird traced
the abyss or the mute was acquitted
that’s what they sent the plague to
to form with a belt the madness of man
the mute crying of the mute
and the pride of the tree confabulan
the beach waves a flag of rare cavilations
Alexis Soto Ramírez (Havana, 1967). Poet. He works as a computer systems architect and resides in Ellicott City, Maryland, USA. His last published book is La moda albana (poetry, Lenguaraz Editions, 2019).
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