Ernesto Cardenal
The Parrots
My friend Michel is the military leader in Somoto,
there near the border with Honduras,
and he told me he discovered a contraband shipment of parrots
set for export to the U.S.
so that there they would learn to speak English.
There were 186 parrots, and 47 had already died in their cages.
And he sent them back where they'd come from,
and when the truck reached a place
they called The Plains
near the mountain homes of these parrots
(the mountains looked huge
rising from these plains)
the parrots began to stir and beat their wings
and jam themselves against their cage walls.
And when the cages were opened
they all flew out like arrows in the same direction
toward their mountains.
This is the same thing, I think, that the Revolution did to us:
it took us out of the cages
in which they'd carried us off to speak English.
It brought us back the homeland from which they'd uprooted us.
The soldiers green like parrots
gave the parrots their green mountains.
But there were 47 who died.
Spanish; trans. Marc Zimmerman
Ernesto Cardenal, Spanish, trans. Marc Zimmerman, Flights of Victory/Vuelos de Victoria, Curbstone Press, 1995.