Poetry Corner: Regional Reading – This Moving Earth

POETRY CORNER – The Regional Reading

– 09/13/17

Hosted by Kathabela Wilson

Our wonderful poet today is from Mexico City. Her skills include poetic translation from the Japanese and her own beautiful bi-lingual poetry. Read in her introduction how she persisted in sending these haiku to us in the midst of troubled times. I am looking forward to hearing her read in Santa Fe, in several days from this writing.

This is the sixteenth in our series of Regional Reading haiku Poetry Corners featuring haiku poets who will be visiting Santa Fe, New Mexico in September for Haiku North America 2017*. Our corners develop from the themes highlighted by their poems and concerns.

~ Kathabela

Cristina Rascón-Castro

I would like to share that, while I was preparing this material, the biggest earthquake in Mexico in the last century (while not the most dangerous) occurred in Mexico City, where I currently live. It is not my first experience but I felt particularly unprotected since I have to leave my desk and run to the street, almost midnight. It was beautiful to see how everybody helped each other, though we didn´t know each other, from different buildings. The earth moved, and the trees, and all pets got anxious. We saw lights on the sky. Honestly I forgot about these haiku, the HNA and everything, but I did carry my laptop with me to the street (¡!). No electricity, no phones, no light, and, gradually, no people on the street, I felt I was inhabiting a place with no time. Some 24 hours later I had the physical and emotional tools to continue life and, since haiku is also a place with no time, this was the first matter to resume.

México is region with a wide variety of atmospheres and habitats, as well as a rich diversity of cultures and languages. I here share some haiku of my own written in the beaches of Zihuatanejo, Guerrero, where I go every year to calm my spirit; from Puebla, where colonial sites and mountain life has welcomed me more than once and from Culiacán, hot climate Northern Mexico, where I was born.

en mar azul
como ballenas muertas
dos rocas negras

on the blue sea
like dead whales
two black rocks

Ο

al ras del suelo
girasol miniatura
no puede girar

on earth’s edge
a miniature sunflower
cannot turn

Ο

entre las olas
el salto de una piedra
cangrejo negro

among the waves
a sudden rock’s leap
a black crab

Ο

margen del nido
un bebé colibrí
es ala y trino

at the nest edge
a newborn hummingbird
wing and cry

Ο

crece el maguey
entre el verde y la tierra
parpadea un ratón

the maguey grows
between earth and green
a mouse blinks

Cristina Rascón-Castro is a Mexican writer and translator of Japanese poetry into Spanish. She has produced collections by contemporary poets Shuntarō Tanikawa, Keijiro Suga, and Seino Chisato as well as a trilingual (Japanese, Spanish, Nahuatl) book of haiku by Chiyo-ni. Cristina’s own books of haiku in Spanish, include one for children, Zoológico de palabritas (Andraval/Japan Foundation). She has received creative writing and translating scholarships, attended artistic residences in five countries and published haiku, poetry, essays, and short stories in a dozen languages. She is the director of Skribalia: Online Global School for Writers and teaches haiku and creative writing in several institutions.

Ο Ο Ο

*The Regional Reading will be performed live at the conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in September, 2017, led by Kathabela Wilson. The dramatic presentation will be accompanied by Rick Wilson on flutes of the various regions. Poets from Australia, India, Canada, United States, and many other regions will be presenting. Look for their haiku in future Poetry Corners.

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