A lucky thing comes to us with this poetry of clear water. The poems arrive from a people that work fourteen hours a day, that farm on the steep hillsides, people whose bodies are basically ropy muscles and who often give half of their lives away to the gods, gods whose faces we wouldn’t even recognize if we saw them, a people who gossip like birds, a people who have received little from our culture besides guns and tin roofs that double the heat in their huts. Do we suspect that the Maya are envious of our elaborate written culture? Humberto Ak’abal says:
If birds
wrote their songs,they would have been forgotten
a long time ago.
The poems are often delicate; we sense a long tradition behind them.
Shadow:
little night
at the foot of any tree.
Ak’abal is a Maya-K’iche’ indian. We then might expect that indigenous poets of Guatemala would be uniformly and justifiably angry and full of rage. Some may be, but apparently Ak’abal is not one of those:
Blackbirds, buzzards and doves
land on cathedrals and palaces
just as they do on rocks
trees and fences…And they shit on them
with the complete freedom of one who knows
that god and justice
belong to the soul.
We mustn’t imagine either that when we look into the delicious simplicity of these poems we are looking at something primitive. Whatever adjective we apply to Ak’abal poetry has to include a recognition of its subtlety, brilliance, and modernity.
In the high hours of the night
stars get naked
and bathe in the rivers.Owls desire them,
the little feathers on their heads
stand up.
