Paulina Pedroso

Nancy Morejón (Cuba)
translated by Margaret Randall

What we fall in love with are her black hands
like ferocious horseflies
illuminating the Apostle’s temples
as she drapes his shoulders
in the buzz of proud palms.
Paulina Pedroso possesses a noble soul.

A gentle breeze passes, unsettling the sky,
light falls across the border
and the gesture relieves Jos  Mart ’s pain.
I would like to have been there: the gallop, the swamp,
on horseback and with a straw hat
but her gaze moves over that marine dusk
that comes in from the small cays,
almost all of them the size of Paulina Pedroso’s hands
in brilliant archipelago.

Paulina Pedroso,
black woman of gold who professes her independence
when she clasps the man of The Golden Age to her breast
while the bells of the brasses and a drum
sound in the ears of her husband Ruperto
as if the young anthem
of Pinar del Rio’s tranquil mountains
and the sublime edges of Tampa . . . in springtime.

Paulina Pedroso possesses the noble soul of the islands.