Adobo Criollo Sergio Antonio Ortiz Rivera

I am a Bird When the sun starts to hide when it sinks parsimoniously like a burned-out fire at the bottom of the immense chalice of sleeping water I start singing and become a black-whiskered vireo on the trembling branch of a mangrove moved by the breeze shaking bathed leaves by the last glimmer of twilight water I sing to the jumping fish They rise to the surface sweetened by my trills of slow sunsets hidden in the thicket of the agonizing horizon

Preterits of Another Light These are the signs of the old flags pierced by the gales of discord The wide-eyed stares of the hordes passed through here Deranged, thirsty for relentless revenge In these dilated savannahs impaled those who dared defy the secular domains of dogma On the margins of these confines waved Presidential flags and the strangled voices of his ragged constituents remain screaming in agony while day comes to light They remain the postponed promises of legions of preterits mocked and reviled We are the heirs of the sad vilification of cloistered convents, peaceful tombs and withered gardens This earth has dried and from its bowels sprout thorns in whose bosom bud the horizontally crucified rising to the edges of the world