Daisy

I'm Only Warning You




Beautiful feline words
expand and retract like snakes
in the complicity of their hiding places

Since you have chosen them
I simply write to warn you;
Nothing will be the same, you
will not be able to retrieve our words
that pierced the air in honest angles.
Bits and pieces may come within your grasp
and you may retrieve them, turn them
over and over, analyzing surfaces and perimeters.
But where you walk is soft as sponge
and shadows feel like home to you.

Don't cut your hands
on caresses of voluptuous velvet.

I'm only telling you: be careful. Each night
a sure claw sharpens itself
behind a pair of almond-yellow eyes
fascinating and implacable.

Daisy Zamora

"I once met the famous Nicaraguan poet Daisy Zamora. This was at the height of the Contra war. She was dressed in battle fatigues. We were in the gardens of an expropriated mansion in Managua, now the headquarters of the Sandinista Cultural Workers' Association. Perhaps you would like to translate some of my poetry sometime, Kent, she said, sipping the rum & Coke brought to her by a male maid, her black, lush hair cascading most dramatically under the cascading bougainvillaea. Perhaps I would, I said. Would you, Daisy, I said with a wink, translate some of mine. Perhaps, I will, she said. Let's first see, however, she said, if we can win this fucking war... Years have gone by, and the world is a very different place. Now Daisy Zamora is a regular at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. Dressed in fashionable versions of traditional vestments from her land, she intones her nostalgic verse to great crowds, who sit rapt and are moved to tears. And all the dead, whose blood so little time ago seemed so heroic and fresh, are by now virtually forgotten."




:Alan Gilbert Different kinds of messages
The Poetry Foundation