14ymedio, Havana, 13 July 2018 — On July 13, 1994, Cuban government forces sank the 13 de Marzo tugboat, which was carrying 72 citizens who were fleeing the island for Florida; 37 people died, including 10 children.
Betania Publishers is making available to our readers the poems recently published by the poet and writer Liliam Moro (Havana, 1946) in trubute to the victims.
Journey to Horror
By Liliam Moro
Papi, don’t look, close your eyes!
(María Victoria García, mother of the drowned child Juan Mario)
The earth is bounded by borders
The sea is free.
But in freedom there is also Death. continue reading
Death is not made of numbers,
it is not a quantitative reckoning.
In a single death
there is humanity.
But when Death arrives uniformed
in three boats
and furiously shoots water from cannons
to sink an opponent
–death by water–
and rams and destroys the opponent,
and this other is not one but seventy-two,
and there are ten children among the seventy-two
–death by water–
and it is at dawn
when the sky and the sea merge
in the same brush of blackness
–death by water–
then, to save themselves,
they clung to a floating corpse
and a mother tells her son to close his eyes
so he will not be frightened on seeing Death
–death by water–
when they ask for clemency
and they respond laughing “let them die”
–death by water–
and they begin to count the bodies face down
adrift,
among them ten children like floating dreams.
How are they, Lord, those who survived?
How are they, Lord, those who shouted
“let them die,”
and now aged so many years later
without the powerful ships, without the water cannons,
with the medals of merit rusting
at the same rate that their souls are rotting?
What god did they blindly obey
whose voice they no longer remember?
How is she, Lord, that woman
who throws candies into the water
every 13th of July?
How are we, Lord, we who remember it
on every anniversary and we foam from the mouth
writing poems
and we cannot tear out that infamous page
from the history books
nor grant them resurrection?
The brutal cannonade of water in the middle of the night
broke to pieces the spheres of the compasses
that showed the cardinal points
of the time to come,
that is called the future;
the glasses shattered
the needles crushed
they could not point to the North.
The bodies no longer float,
they wenty sinking
with the slowness of inevitable.
They didn’t need the ferryman Charon.
they were unhurriedly sinking
like he who finally rests
and abandons himself to the dream where Nothing receives him.
Tangled in the silt
among the blind fish,
they descended to keep company
with old rusty boats
of rotten wood
that have been accumulating for centuries
where the abyss begins;
and down there, in the depth of the deep
so like infinity
lie the beings who tried
to move to another nearby geography.
And they are there still.
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