Ana Cecilia Blum
translated by Cristi Donoso
Posesión
[Original]
POSESIÓN
Nada es nuestro.
Siquiera la sombra
que se hace de uno mismo
con sus infinitos verbos mudos.
No son nuestros ni el poema
ni la tinta que lo escribe,
tampoco la tierra
en que se nace
en la que se morirá.
Sin ofrendar la huella
nos vamos diluyendo
hasta convertirnos
en vapor de día frío
libado por el espacio.
Possession
Nothing is ours.
Not even our shadow
that makes itself of our own being
with its infinite muted verbs.
Neither the poem
nor the ink that writes it, are ours,
not the land
that we are born to
nor the land where we will lie dead.
Without offering up even a footprint,
we go on fading
until we become
the vapor of a winter day
lost to the open air.
Bio
Ana Cecilia Blum (Guayaquil, March 17, 1972) is an Ecuadorian poet, essayist, fiction writer, editor, translator and journalist. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of the digital magazine Metaforología which publishes poetry, fiction and essays. She currently lives between Ecuador and the United States. Some of her work has been translated into English, French, Italian and Portuguese.
Cristi Donoso is an Ecuadorian American writer whose work has been published by The Threepenny Review, The Cincinnati Review, PANK, Catapult, and others. She was a 2021-2022 PEN/Faulkner Writer in Residence and a 2022 Best of the Net finalist. Her first poetry collection was a finalist for the 2022 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize at University of Notre Dame Press. Born in Quito, she lives outside Washington, DC.