FRAGMENTS TO DOMINATE SILENCE
I
The forces of language are solitary, devastated ladies, who sing through my voice I hear in the distance. And far away, in the black sand, lies a dense daughter of ancestral music. Where the true death? I have wanted to illuminate myself in the light of my lack of light. Branches die in memory. The reclined girl dwells within me, wearing her wolf mask. She who couldn’t anymore and implored flames and we burned.
II
When the roof flies off the house of language and words don’t offer shelter, I speak.
The ladies in red lost themselves in their masks even though they’ll come back to sob among flowers.
Death is not mute. I listen to the song of the mourners seal the cracks of silence. I listen to your sweetest weeping blooming in my gray
silence.
III
Death has returned its enchanting prestige to silence. And I won’t say my poem and I must say it. Even if the poem (here, now) doesn’t make sense, it has no destiny.
Alejandra Pizarnik
Translation by Lydia Merriman Herrick