Pay tribute to exiled Cuban poet Raúl Rivero, three of whose poems start on page
What are these gentlemen looking for in my house? What is this officer doing reading the sheet of paper on which I've written the words "ambition," "lightness," and "brittle"? What hint of...
...As it is blue I look at it but Mama is the one who tears open the pages of the days...
...I discovered "Open Gift" in the magazine Critica (Puebla, Mexico), December 2001...
...A NOTE ON THESE POEMS: "Search Order" was published in the Mexican magazine Letras Libres, in the May 2003 issue, with the following commentary: "Blanca Reyes, the wife of the poet, journalist and peaceful dissident Rani Rivero, was able to rescue this poem after the political police of Cuba took him prisoner and confiscated all his books and papers...
...Suffering doesn't appear on the flat and gray X-ray screens...
...Rivero was condemned to twenty years in prison this past April...
...It came to me from the south in January of the year 2001 and already I don't have enough air...
...Dogs don't perceive images...
...It's a good present because it marks the seasons as well and thus one knows exactly when the time has come to dress warmly...
...Don't let yourselves be seduced by papers nobody is going to traffic with dreams...
...A specialist in aporia came, a literary critic with the rank of interim corporal who examined at the point of a gun the hills of poetry books...
...I won't let the boy hang out with the boogeyman...
...Your special agents do they figure out metaphors...
...How does he interpret my certificates of divorce...
...What hint of conspiracy speaks to him from the photo without a dedication of my father in a guayabera (black tie) in the fields of the National Capitol...
...Rivero has told me that "Manifesto for the General Customs Office of the Republic" was the last poem he composed in Cuba, before departing into exile...
...Eight policemen are examining the texts and drawings of my daughters, and are infiltrating themselves into my emotional networks and want to know where little Andrea sleeps and what does her asthma have to do with my carpets...
...Where will his techniques of harassment lead him when he reads the ten-line poems and discovers the war wounds of my great-grandfather...
...DISSENT / Spring 2006 n 35...
...Allow the free flow of delirium The coming and going of the spirit...
...P.13...
...Eight policemen in my house with a search order, a clean operation, a full victory for the vanguard of the proletariat who confiscated my Consul typewriter, one hundred forty-two blank pages and a sad and personal heap of papers — the most perishable of the perishable from this summer...
...Although it is not a calendar of the tropics I understand it and forgive its distance from insular island weather and its graceful way of making inventories of my tragic material...
...Don't try to prohibit my nostalgia Don't decree that this internal pain is subversive...
...Sincere phantasms don't use jewels...
...Let me go on dreaming that I didn't go Just as right now I'm dreaming that I went...
...34 n DISSENT / Spring 2006 POLITICS ABROAD Susanna has sent me from the south an almanac so that I will finally learn to grow old...
...They want the code of a message from Zucu in the upper part of a cryptic text (here a light triumphal smile of the comrade): "Castles with music box...
...Susanna's almanac makes me know as well with precision that sometimes my friends experience the cold and have to go out in the fog and the snow in the desolation of the winters...
...Jennie...
...Thus one goes out prudently in the spring knowing not to be seduced by the expected and announced beauty...
Vol. 53 • April 2006 • No. 2
