Alfonsina Storni
The woods of the horizon
are on fire;
eluding flames,
the swift blue bucks
of twilight
cross.
Little golden goats
migrate toward
the vault
and recline
on the blue moss.
Below,
the city
rises up,
a cement rose,
motionless on its stem
of dark cellars.
Its black pistils -
towers, cupolas -
emerge,
waiting for lunar
pollen.
Suffocated
by the flames of the fire
and lost
among the petals of the rose,
almost invisible,
crossing back and forth
the men . . .
Alfonsina Storni
1892-1938
Men in the City translated from the Spanish by Rachel Benson
Alfonsina Storni was born at sea to Argentine parents who registered her birth in Switzerland. She lived for most of her life in Buenos Aires. Self-supporting from the age of thirteen, she travelled with a theatre company, wrote plays for children, worked as a teacher, a milliner, and a journalist. She had one son. The publication of her first book in 1916 brought immediate recognition, and she was soon accorded the stature of a major poet throughout Latin America. In 1938, incurably ill, she drowned herself in the waters of Mar del Plata.
From the Penguin Book of Women Poets 1978
