THE MOVELESS SEA OF THE LLANOS by Oscar Echeverri Mejía
translated from Spanish by Judith Rodriguez

You don’t have to tell me it’s the sea. That I knew
from the herons dreaming of their sails. From the palm-grove islands
lifting their tall masts.
I sensed it
from the horizon holding the sky up on arms of mist,
from the sun sinking
to die in the arm of the anguished sea of grass
and the sun rising
reborn, like a great sea-beacon.

You don’t have to tell me it’s the sea. I felt it
in the hot waves of pasture that invade the beaches
like a crazed great vegetable tongue. In the wind’s murmur
tasting of salt. In my little streams
that creep through the plain and pour out their waters.
In the sea-gulf of the Meta.
In the strange siren-songs –
ship’s sirens and sirens of flesh and bone –
you hear there in the night. In the shipwreck
of things living and not living, every sunset. 

I know it now: it is sea,
I asked for no proofs
seeing how the Meta drowns in its huge waves
how the plainsman steers among its endless currents
and stays afloat, /
how the young bull – miraculous amphibian –
nibbles stars in its crystalline glass,
how the horse runs on through its ecstatic waves of green
with his mane like a ship’s rigging.

Yes, it is sea, a sea not named on maps, alive with creatures
made in its image and likeness.
The sea where men and animals sink
and where the sun and moon are born, each in its own way.

I know beyond all doubt, it is sea
and I too am inside its spell
like the rider, like the young bull, like heron and parrot,
like palm and snake and monkey,
like the water coursing its grassy entrails.

This is the sea and now I can never forget
its lessons of sun and solitude,
its daily toil, destroying and creating,
its mighty surges of heat, of death and life,
its green storms,
its calm times and its vegetable dreaming,
the calls – symphonies even – of its animals.

Sea of the great Plain, I am coming back to you,
because my fate as a sailor of the earth
tells me that here I shall keep some day my tryst with water.

Grief and Hardship, Cali, 1974