Ernesto Cardenal sof 71 May 2005 Cabinet Meeting We are summoned to a cabinet meeting, knowing in advance it is for a very important reason but not what.
All the ministers and directors of autonomous bodies round the big table.
And it was a serious matter: the setting up of a National Emergency Committee for the danger of a plague of Aedes Aegypti mosquitoes.
They breed especially in artificial vessels.
They can be recognised by the silver lines on their thorax.
It is the female that bites human beings.
She needs their blood for her eggs which she deposits in any vessel containing water.
Apreventive campaign must be mounted in vases, bottles, old tyres, barrels, roof gutters, get rid of unuseful objects keep patios clean, air and ground fumigation.
Small and dark they carry an infection with a high mortality rate among children and dangerous to the old.
Very possibly there will be an outbreak in Nicaragua.
Material resources. Financial.
An intensive propaganda campaign.
Support from all departments: Health, Transport, Education, Air Force...
Involvement of workers and students...
And I look at the serious faces round the big table strewn with files, ashtrays, and I think: how odd, how very odd. It’s love.
The cabinet meeting for love of their neighbour.
Ernesto Cardenal ‘Meditation in a DC-3’ appears in Nicaraguan NewTime (Journeyman Press,London 1988).The other two poems appear in Poets of the Nicaraguan Revolution (Katabasis 1993),which also has a love poem by Dora MaríaTéllez.Both books translated by Dinah Livingstone.
Before theAssault on the Palace onAugust 22nd 1978,poet Daisy Zamora hid half the squad in her house in Managua.‘Meditation’ was written shortly after the triumph of the Revolution in 1979.Felipe in the poem is Felipe Peña,a member of Ernesto Cardenal’s peasant community in Solentiname.He was one of the sixty political prisoners released after theAssault on the Palace and was killed during the Final Offensive in May 1979 in Nueva Guinea,S.E.
Appears in Poets of the Nicaraguan Revolution (Katabasis 1993), translated by Dinah Livingstone.