I am surprised to find myself reading with great interest things like cotton harvest twenty five percent up on last year coffee exports US$124.2 million 17.5% up on last year a 13.6% increase in sugar is expected maize production down -5.9% gold 10% down because of Contra attacks in that region likewise shellfish… When did such data ever interest me before? It is because now our wealth however little is to be for everyone. So it is for the people, love of the people this interest. Love is now the meaning of these figures. Gold dug from the Earth, solid sun cut into blocks, will become electric light drinking water for the poor. Translucent molluscs, reminiscent of women, the smell of a woman, come from the sea, its submarine caves and coloured gardens of coral to be pills, desks. Matter's holiness. Mother, you know what a glass of milk is worth. Soft cloud-whirl cotton – we went singing to the cotton-cutting, in our fingers we held clouds – will become, roads, zinc roofs, the economic has become poetic or rather, with the Revolution economics now is love.
Ernesto Cardenal
Translated by Dinah Livingstone
This translation was first published in Nicaraguan New Time. Poems by Ernesto Cardenal (Minister of Culture in the 1980s Sandinista government), translated by Dinah Livingstone. (Journeyman Press, London 1988). The Spanish original was published in Tocar el Cielo (Salamanca, 1981).