Agronomy Lesson

Translated from the Spanish of Amando Fernández (Havana, 1948-Miami, 1994) by Orlando Ricardo Menes

     To hear a voice that understands you is to freeze
     our absences.
To change the earth of our steps
into sudden echoes
and to unsettle the stillness of a horizon that already appeared to us
   alone and unreachable;
it is to find one’s hands tied up with promises,
your life made up of minimal deaths that force you
    to grow along the paths,
by the high walls and mounds,
likewise the green ivies and the creeping thickets
sentenced to never perish
but to stubbornly cling to life after every blow meant
     to humiliate them
and to tear them from the deepest growth
     where the roots join with the earth.
That is why
one must bury hope in the deepest place
so that it hides
—still, patient, attainable—
at a primal level
where what one suffers and knows
is the nutritious fertilizer
that one day will make the grain seed open its heart
in mother earth, warm and fierce,
and from its own name, a seed of shadows,
burst forth a silent future, uncontainable and glorious,
that will shelter,
a copious tree,
all life in the embrace of its branches.    

---

Amando Fernandez has published nine collections of poetry, most notably, Herir el tiempo, El ruiseñor y la espada, and Museo natural. The collections Ciudad, isla invisible, and El riesgo calculado were published posthumously in 1994. In addition to these collections, Fernandez was awarded for his poetry, which included: the Luis de Góngora, the Juan Ramón Jiménez, and the Antonio González de Lama prizes. Fernandez attended Florida International University and subsequently taught at the Interamerican Campus of Miami Dade College.

Orlando Ricardo Menes is an NEA Fellow and a winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize, and the author of six poetry collections, most recently Memoria from LSU Press. His poetry has appeared in numerous magazines, most recently in Poetry, the Cincinnati Review, and Prairie Schooner. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Notre Dame where he is a Professor of English.