Sparrowhearts

^{translated from the Catalan by Mary Ann Newman}

The women of my family family
hunted hunted birds, sparrows, birds, sparrows, and they made them sing
sing day in day out day in day out day in as the pots boiled, inner courtyards
wide open,
washtubs soaked old naked moth eaten watery
            unrinsed firstwashed clothes
and the windows opened, gave birth, opened
so beauty would regale them with songs and flowers and flowers and songs,
buzzing, zigzagging, chirping, whispering,
not understanding that they understood nothing. Nothing at all.
They only knew, enjoyed, died for beauty.
I will be smothered by a hitch of light, a pitch of light, a ditch of light.
And so they decapitated the animal,
they saw its blood run rivulet of blood, run, run
with life run, down the drain run, trickle, fickle girl blood,
               altar girl blood,
and they didn’t get it but they ate it so as not to die
and they made me eat it so as not to die.
And so thanks to death we didn’t die. The blood was inside us.
              Caged. Protected.
Assimilated, encircled, the blood inside and not out,
Little daughter, they called me, little darling, they said, apple of my
eyes, my little blood, they said to me said-said
moving anxiously, nervously, rushing back and forth and back
in those little apartments where I
was imagining jungles full of animals, flaming volcanoes, the earth
               opening beneath my feet, the rain ravaging life,
               the thunder and lightning burning down the houses, the snow
               destroying
hearts, I imagined
               I or the blood imagined always enclosed within the circuit
blood shut in not spilt 
and they
sewed. They sewed a lot of things. They patched up sheets the way
             they patched up lives. And they patched up shadows and words
             and men and mountains they patched up as if
they had been told a handful of mean truths,
a handful of coins worth of truths, a sprinkling of truth, a
couple of pinches of truths, a few threads of very mean
truths, little hapless truths, impoverished, much poorer than
poor than those beggars who knocked on the door every day. Knock knock.
            Yes? Could you give me something? It’s cold and I’m hungry.
            If you wait a few minutes I will make you an omelet on bread
            and you will become angels and in this way
            amid angels and without answers they lived. It is as if they knew
            that no one knew anything.
And so they opened their legs and were inseminated
plowed, used up, tanned, possessed,
allowing a new being to inhabit them. In the burrow, close
           to the bones, stuffed between their organs, wet with their
           liquids, swallowed up by their blood, protected by a bag, pelted by
           the heart and the voices that came from the other world, with lots
           of names spoken backwards, the names of mystery.