Claudia Lars

trans. by Philip Pardi

My Refuge

It isn’t easy living in this hate-filled age
if we hide our purest splendor deep within,
and our soul’s keeper rejects, utterly,
the human call to kill.

Sinister forces extend their reach
while a few naked sins flash,
anything but elegant—
and yet my pot of geraniums radiates 
its scented offering so gently
and those sky-chasing sparrows are still there 
in the morning air.

Should I think death
is merely skeletons
or learn the bee’s history, 
old as honey?

I’m not interested in Paris or Moscow
or the cities of Gringoland.   
A village of neighbors without newspapers
keeps me from grief 
and I discover the loving, rustic riches
of the Bethlehem to come.

Philip Pardi is the author of Meditations on Rising and Falling (Wisconsin, 2008), which won the Brittingham Poetry Prize and the Writers’ League of Texas Award for Poetry. His poems and translations have appeared in Seneca Review, Translation Review, Gettysburg Review, Best New Poets, and Introduction to the Prose Poem. He teaches at Bard College. 

Claudia Lars (pen name for Carmon Brannon) is one of El Salvador’s most treasured and beloved poets. Born in 1899 to a Salvadoran mother and an Irish-American father, Lars published fourteen books of poems and a volume of short stories. Since her death in 1974, two separate editions of selected poems and a two-volume edition of complete poems have been published in San Salvador.