THREE POEMS by Juan Mosquera Restrepo, translated by Maurice Rodriguez

Numbers Upon Numbers

It’s a rehearsal for the end of the world,
I told myself.
But it has been the end
of many worlds.

They say two hundred died yesterday.
They say that at the end of this day
three hundred will have been,
four hundred may be gone tomorrow.

They talk about numbers
in a country
that lost its shudder.

Numbers upon numbers.
This is how we learned to add subtractions.

Since this hell started,
how many who used to have three meals a day
now have only one?

They are not figures; they are biographies.
If your name were inside the next sad number
you would count it differently,
you know it.

It’s a rehearsal for the end of the world,
I told myself.
But it has been the end
of many worlds.

The Land of Whispers

What does it mean to put these words together?
Talk to the moon, invite the wolves
walk barefoot in the rain
awaiting the next storm
ask the atheists the name of their god.

You know by hearsay
the map of the land of whispers.
Which, as you know, only gets one lost.
What does it mean to put these words together?

It would be better to start a collection of silences.

Wanderers

Systole, diastole
and diaspora,
movements of a distant heart.
The track’s rails
in an ancient town
kiss the passage of a train
that is leaving.

That is leaving.

Maurice Rodriguez is a writer and translator originally from Connecticut. He is now based in New York City where he is an Editorial Fellow with A Public Space. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School, and an MA in English from UConn. He is also an adjunct professor of writing across various universities. His work has appeared in HASH, Puerto del Sol, and ANMLY, and was selected for Deep Vellum‘s inaugural 2024 Best Literary Translations anthology.