from Los poemas que vi por un telescopio (“Poems I Saw Through a Telescope”)
Translated from the Spanish by Ryan Greene
H ---------- H
COSMONAUTS’ WINDOW
DICTATED BY ANDROMEDA IV
June 20th
2065. LOST NIGHTS
it’s almost time for day to break
you believed you’d escaped the past and death
the future and death
you believed you were escaping when it was 5:30
day breaks over the city
a bird sings to the star that’s diluting its violet eyes
and the celestial flower unfurls to the light of the view
14 dazzling minutes
it endures deep in the heart
Yaxkin Melchy Ramos (Mexico City, 1985) is a Mexican and Peruvian-Quechua poet, translator, ecopoetics researcher, bookmaker, and artisan-activist-editor who writes primarily in Spanish. He is the author of THE NEW WORLD, a five-part “constellation-book” which was written intermittently between 2007 and 2017. Currently he is a post-doctoral student at the University of Tsukuba in Japan, where he is researching ecopoetic currents between Japan and Latin America. Since 2017, he has been translating contemporary Japanese poetry to Spanish.
Ryan Greene (b. 1994) is a translator, book farmer, and poet from Phoenix, Arizona who is currently working with Yaxkin Melchy to translate the first three books of THE NEW WORLD. He’s a co-conspirator at F*%K IF I KNOW//BOOKS and a housemate at no.good.home. His translations include work by Elena Salamanca, Claudina Domingo, Ana Belén López, Giancarlo Huapaya, and Yaxkin Melchy, among others. Like Collier, the ground he stands on is not his ground.
World Poetry Review 