Interlitq publica su poema en inglés para el 03.03.12, “Considering The Orioles and a Bird Extinct” por la poeta de Nueva Zelanda Siobhan Harvey, una Editora Consultora de Interlitq, y que contribuyó a las ediciones 10, 12 y 14 de Interlitq
Considering The Orioles and a Bird Extinct
Looking into the mirror of your page
The last time is like
The first time:
The old house guards its memories, the birds
Returning to me, migrants, your words flutter
Mind and heart. You create safe shore clasping
To yourself the memory of lost feathers, lost birdcall.
They cluster at the feeding station, and rags of song
Greet the neighbours. ‘Was that your voice?’
Somewhere on this land lies buried the bones
Of an extinct piopio, ancestor of Ashbery’s muse.
Somewhere deep in the lines of your poem too.
But one morning you get up and the vermillion-coloured
Messenger is there, bigger than life at your window
Excavating a poem is like excavating a dead bird:
For both, we must count the silences, unravel
The subtext and discover how order is broken
Across the body, spilling into fresh lines.
And even when they fly against the trees in bright formation
You know the peace they brought was long overdue.
How neat, a poem that remembers the bird still,
As if it was a dictionary, as if it was a page.
* ‘Found’ lines from John Ashbery’s ‘The Orioles’.
Acerca de Siobhan Harvey:
Siobhan Harvey is the author of Our Own Kind: 100 New Zealand Poems about Animals (Random House NZ, 2009). Her poetry has been published in international magazines and anthologies such as Booknotes – New Zealand Book Council Magazine, fin (UK), foam:e (Aus), In the red (UK), and Landfall. She is the Poetry Editor of Takahe magazine and was 2009 Auckland Regional Council Writer in Residence. Her first New Zealand poetry collection, Lost Relatives (Steele Roberts, 2011) has just been released.
