Osvaldo Sauma (Costa Rica, 1949).

Poet and letterature teacher at the Conservatorio de Castella of San José, Costa Rica. Books published: Las Huellas del Desencanto (The Traces of Disenchantment), 1982, Retrato en Familia (Portrait in a Family Group),Latin American Prize, EDUCA, 1985, Asabis, 1993. Madre Nuestra Fertil Tierra (Mother Ours, Fertile Earth) (with Freddy Jones) 1997, Bitácora del Iluso (Chronicle of the Decieved) 2000, El Libro del Adiós (The Book of Farewell) 2006, Chronicle of the Decieved (Bilingual edition, Spanish-English), 2009. Anthologies: Poesía Infantil del Conservatorio de Castella (Poems by the Children of the Castella Conservatory) 1986, Los Signos Vigilantes (The Watchful Signs; an anthology of ecological poetry) 1982, Tierra de Nadie (No Man's Land; nine Latin American poets) 1994, La Sangre Iluminada (The Enlightened Blood; six Latin American poets) 1998, Martes de Poesía en el Cuartel de la Boca del Monte (Tuesday Night Poetry Readings at the Cuartel de la Boca del Monte) 1998, Antología de Seis Poetas Latinoamericanos (Anthology of Six Latin American Poets) 2006,



A woman dances

hidden in the night
a woman dances
she spreads her arms
like saying wings
from the air's core
to the air's rim
slanted between walls of shadow
to the voids of light

a woman whirls
like a star turns
graphs on herself

the paths of chance
and its declensions

dances
turns
like lifting a bird
from the earth's grasp
raises a magnetic time
draws with a blazing coal
the red speech of the caves

dances
and shakes
the childhood frights
that still in fear
call us from inside her

a woman dances
on the heart of wood
to set on fire
the blind beat of life
dances on my wounds to harshen
the path of remorse

a woman dances
alone against misfortune
on the straying planet
on a mishap of memory
and flees on that fugue of music
and turns on herself
to show us a desire
that was banished from the Earthly Paradise


Utopia of the loner

I look for the word
that will drive a crowd
that will gather all words behind it
enriched
within the fire of what was lost
a word that will hold
the key to the unsayable
and the clairvoyance of the said

a word
that will braid close
the islands of the heart
so the sea will crash on them
its soft sleeplessness

an awesome word
whose mere voice will blast the foe
and sign a mirror
where each will see himself in the other
and in timelessness

a word
to invoke the rain
and all its hazards
and like the wind
call on all countries
and once turned to bread
men will commune with each other


Old child father mine

I

I saw you so frightened
so childlike
when in your eyes Father
death gave notice
of its irrevocable coming

I longed to say then
thank you
to embrace you and bid you farewell
to remind you that God
had always forgiven you
God forgives all those
who stake their life on life
who with their heart’s courage
contrive the paths of their existence
and all its hazards

I longed to tell you
that I loved your loftiness among the lofty
your humbleness among the humble
and your stubborn pride
forged
on the noble sands of the deserts

II

I longed
Father
to lead you to your Father’s grave
hoping that you
would forgive in life
the aloneness that in his life
he left you
who now lies alone
in Port Father

I wanted you to leave
without that weight at your side

so that on that far shore
your burden would be lighter
that you would leave your wounds
on this one

III

now you can leave in peace
old child father mine
already your grandsons speak of you
as if you were not gone
as if you were an abiding presence
in our days

do not fear
as soon as you cross the passage of light
the houris will restore your child heart
you’ll play again in the sun of the departed
and I will give my Father
the embrace I could not give in his death
to my Father who lies now
alone in Port Father


Millenium's end

(first drink)

I'm so alone
not even the police wants me
this Caldas rum
is doing nothing
for my sadness

there are no lovers at hand
no roaches
to remind me
of this planet’s fate

my sons are off
on their affairs
and I’m so on my own
that I can understand suicides
but don’t dare shoot myself

(second drink)

they were right
when he made man
God was two drinks short
now solitude
is a crucible of dreams
women I knew
return
to sow their blooms of dust

two drinks
and the world's face changes
small matters fade
one flirts with death


(third drink)

to take the path of self-appeasement
counsels the I Ching
but this heart
wants to leave its cage now
won't put up with the sainthood
this refuge demands

it wants to go out
take to the streets
spend itself in quick affairs
and dare all dangers
knowing the true warrior
is already dead

(fourth drink)

why does this number
bother me

is it because
I’m the third brother of four
Or is it the grade I got most
in high school
or I don't know
because
it’s a cabalistic number
or maybe just
because I like odd numbers best


(fifth drink)

Li Po's moon blooms again
the thirst of being eases
someone else wears my skin
sweeps out all guilts
and all hates

holds the helm close to his chest
the ship reels
like a drunkard


Zingonia Zingone (Italy). Zingonia Zingone (Italy). Poet and novelist, writes in Italian and Spanish. Brought up between Italy and Costa Rica, graduated in Economics, worked in banking and agriculture in Italy and Central America. Currently lives in Rome.
Poetry editions in Spanish: Mascara del delirio (Ediciones Perro Azul, 2006), Cosmo-agon(Ediciones Perro Azul, 2007), Tana Katana (Ediciones Perro Azul, 2009);
Poetry edition Italian/Spanish Maschera del delirio (Lietocolle, 2008);
Novel edited in Italian: Il velo (Elephanta Press, 2000).
Founder of AltreBraci, association for the diffusion of poetry in Rome.
Her poems have been published in numerous Latin American literary magazines and thematic anthologies.


Hallucinations

To cross the doorway
Not knowing if you've gone in
Or are going out

Or where its gap leads
Which you know well
But which you've never seen.

At the end of the passage
A man walks firmly
A treadmill. His stare
Phantoms you.
He doesn’t come up, he doesn't touch you.
His doubts wheel around,
Reach you, slide by
And howl inside you.

The man at the end of the passage
Seeks beyond your flesh
That which you can't imagine:
To steal what the void needs
Or to empty himself
Wholly in you.

The door is no longer there,
Nor the passage nor its frame,
Nor its end, but
The man walks timing his heartbeat
In your breast,

Knowing he cannot snare
The shadow that repeats him,
The vision that moves him.
He's only a body walking a treadmill
And you are a fiction
A bit more than you were before,
More than you'll ever be.


Nostalgia

Mortal disease
That wavers between
Time and distance
Irreversible state
Generator of sweet and painful desire
For what has been lost
Of that part of me
That lived in you
And without you dies
Forever

The expatriated "me"
Of my original "you".

Tamale flavoured
Quest for my wasted time.

Banished,
The Bolero has become my native mantra
And I just yearn for damp,
Manure-smelling mud

Conscious of the fact that
Return does not promise
Reunion.

Impotent before the hope
-An illusion-
Of a period ended
That will not come back.


Birthday

Birth:
Mother faith
That trusts the world
A generous womb.

The small cry
Announces
That from light,
Slowly comes death;

Every age arrives
Punctual,
Celebrating the remembrance
That stillness approaches.


The Perfect Angle

A woman carries the mother-heart
And in it resides a man
From the Central Valley

He is still a boy
On his bicycle
Roaming the arteries
Of the great sensorial bazaar
Searching for the medullar beat
Where his fierceness
And that distant moan
May become one.

A woman carries the loving heart,
Gets up from the chair
Her gaze fixed on the horizon.
It could be midday:
There is no shadow
Her forehead’s burning.

The sun of the Central Valley burns
There, where the rooster still sleeps
And the man, as torment,
In her still pulses.

Pulses the hunger in his gaze
Gaze that devours her
And sends her back
To a place lived in Anatolia.

A woman writes her best tale,
Places her future in the beak
Of a migrating bird
And searches in the wind
The perfect angle
Which may rouse the seas
And the mountain ranges
And may transform that man-latitude
Into her womb

And the Universe into the mute thalamus
Of the Central Valley.

Tightrope Walker

Balancing, arms outspread,
Like a smiling anguish, she walks the rope,
Repeating herself, not looking back,
Not stepping back
To the starting point.

The rope turns in the wind,
A spinning top of issues in the air. It curls into a skein
Hollow at its center.

She treads the rope, that is the way
Others call madness,
Arms spread out
And smiling.