Claudia Lars

trans. by Philip Pardi

Thinking of the Great Dream

To have lived through a June full of flowers.
To have found the richest hive of the honeybees.
To move toward my death still savoring
the taste of love, the taste of many loves.

The land where those who sew the land go hungry.
The land in which they’ll bury me: a good land.
Such a vegetable body! Such sandy eyes,
beneath both dark and pale shades of green.

Life will always and always be life: we carry 
a tune we can’t forget into a place 
where every one of us is everything.

This shadow dimming my window will become, 
right there, before my very eyes, the new 
morning, resplendent, and yet different.

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.