Darling Mother...

It is with sadness that I tell you of the bitter distress that my tears drain down today. The scratching sand intensifies my grief, shrivelling the white towers of my voice. Sometimes justice seems to be a wall of cruelty where only the face of an animal is exalted, not the voice of legality. 

Today I express to you my emotions that ride with my dreams. I strip my verses naked in that pallid adventure that daily tires my reason. I could wish at this moment you were a firefly in my gaze, to assuage this nauseous disgust that is palpable, where liberty is frozen and I cannot breathe.

No, it is not my intention to alarm your sensitive heart, but today I am dragged in the chains of that horrible prison in which fear, anxiety, oppression submerge me, day in, day out, in the chloroform of a betrayer who manipulates us with his proclamations.

I spend my life seeking a better world where my heart is not ravaged by fiery sabres. I need to know that a new dawn will come, that my world will not be a paper world under the brute authority of a bilious caprice.

Darling Mother...

Today I invite you to share with me that readiness to fight, so that the days to come may be filled with happiness, and even if times of calamity may drag me in the dust, I shall rise up light-spirited into the warmth of a new dawn, the tricolour nailed to my being.

No, do not hold back my soaring flight, for the days pass quickly, and my emotions go forward unsmiling. Sad and afflicted I may be, and immersed in my pain: yet that unworthy man who tramples on the heroic deeds of great Bolívar shall never silence my voice.

©Noris Roberts.

Translated by Brian Cole and Timothy Adès.