Weekend & Bank Holiday Poet (by María Eugenia Bravo Calderara)

I am a poet of weekends
and bank holidays,
a poet of undesirable hours
who enlightens herself
at a time that is never convenient.

Worse still!
I am a poet with skirts
that is to say
almost
a genetic contradiction.
A transgressor poet for those
who want their poetry
to wear trousers.

And so
on some weekends
or bank holidays,
I write,
usually trembling,
with my right hand,
while my left hand
talks to my heart,

And I scribble with passion
wet lines,
which my ardent passion
brings to life
with my blood.

I am a poet of huge round and yellow
shimmering suns,
of silent golden moons
that watch over the night
and of blue clear skies where
the South wind
gallops.

I am a poet of other starry skies,
of a wild geography,
of unknown and cruel seas.

I am a poet of a love that once was
and of love that could never be,
the poet of the streets I used to walk,
of streets I was
forbidden to walk, of streets
I could only walk down with the eyes
of memory.

I am a poet of lives that have ceased
to exist and I carry with me the voices
of those we have learned to call
"the disappeared"
and I am the voice of all those people
from other continents
who cry and wail their need,
people I do not want to forget
or leave behind.

I am a poet of ears that see
and eyes that touch and smell.
I am a poet who speaks with all her body,
who plants her feet on roots yet
entangles her arms in the clouds
and talks to the sky.
I am a poet who has attached her voice
to her heart and her heart to her eyes
and I suffer with you
when life brings its pain.

As you can see, my friends,
I am just this:
just a poet like any other poet.
The only difference:
that I only can write
my lines, trembling,

during a weekend
or a bank holiday.