Medina

4X2

an online poetry journal

  • The Trials of Paradise

    by Pablo Medina

    How not to leave this island
    of lizards and stone cushions?
    How not to turn my back
    on the sea urchin and the scorpion?

    I'm going, as I said some time ago,
    to a field where the clouds are grazing
    and the lilies hum an ancient tune of nebular origin.

    On that field the ragged cows interpret
    one another and swans waddle
    wing-to-elbow with a lion
    and an old dog howls
    and bites its rump all day.
    Such are the trials of paradise.

    I promise to leave you all behind
    dozing in your cave of shadows. The sun
    is an owl's yawn and the stars
    the roe of a occult bird.

    I will dive in the waters that swallow snow
    and make foam and no one understands.

Cuban-born Pablo Medina is the author of sixteen books, including the poetry collections The Island Kingdom, The Man Who Wrote on Water, Calle Habana, Points of Balance/Puntos de Apoyo, and others; the novels Cubop City Blues, The Cigar Roller, The Return of Felix Nogara, and Marks of Birth; and the memoir Exiled Memories: A Cuban Childhood. He has received awards from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others. He teaches at Emerson College in Boston.