FIVE MESSAGES FROM PUERTO RICO

SONG
Island yet, in the coral of your star forms
Creator of archangelic light, eternal
Maker of music of palm groves and candles
Island yet in the incense of the beautiful maker of dreams of dusky maidens.
Island yet in the incense of the beautiful doves of the seas of foam,
frothed flash of pain in the marble cloisters of your splendor
and in the opaque blues of your dynastic tread,
For you, a race died in war leaving its war to others.
For you, other men let blood in a revolt
For you they died.
They destroyed.

Island of the soul, tormented maiden, ensnared ln the thorns of brambles
enchanted, sleeping in the palace of the sea.
Your dream awakens in the wings of a pitirra
or dissolves in a nightingale’s song or in the bill of a thrush
Island lulled by our blood.
By the buried Christs in your entrails,
Arise the dust, arise the dust.

Jose Manuel Torres Santiago