Hélène Cardona

Strength
April 24, 2020 Cardona Hélène

Strength

After the storm
emerald diaphanous waves
envelop golden oceans bled by sun

Ghosts and demons rest
dismantle shields
In radiant light, latent powers awaken

I’ll drink your tears, communion
of souls, transcend pain into love
give myself over to the sublime and ferocious

May I fall beyond earth
unbind all energies
the unrevealed

Resting on the mountain’s face
kissed by clouds
taking in the whole sky

your blueness comes through each time
wonderful magic of
holding silence

How I use geography
to find myself
mind and heart in unison

Underneath precise physical laws
and the apparent play of chance
lies mysterious healing power

Let’s share exquisite pomegranates,
smear them in each other’s faces

 

 

Hélène Cardona is the author of seven books, more recently the award-winning Life in Suspension and the translations Birnam Wood (José Manuel Cardona), Beyond Elsewhere (Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac), winner of a Hemingway Grant, Ce que nous portons (Dorianne Laux), and Walt Whitman’s Civil War Writings for WhitmanWeb.

She wrote her thesis on Henry James for her Masters in American Literature from the Sorbonne, taught at Hamilton College and LMU, and worked as an interpreter for the Canadian Embassy in Paris. She received fellowships from the Goethe-Institut and the Universidad Internacional de Andalucía.

Her work has been translated into 16 languages. A Romanian translation of Dreaming My Animal Selves was published by Junimea Editions in 2016. She also translated Rimbaud, Baudelaire, René Depestre, Ernest Pépin, Aloysius Bertrand, Maram Al-Masri, Eric Sarner, Jean-Claude Renard, Nicolas Grenier, Christiane Singer, John Ashbery, John FitzGerald and Maggie Smith.

http://helenecardona.com