Daisy Zamora Meditation in a DC-3 I don’t know why I remembered Novalis’ phrase: ‘touching a naked body is touching heaven’.
The military pilot opened his map of our country to show the dark little girl of nine (it was our land below) and his hand brushed her small hand.
Down there lay Muy Muy, rivers, Nueva Guinea where Felipe fell. ‘It’s touching heaven...’ But what if they don’t believe in heaven?
Of course it’s not the high blue sky that’s Earth still and flying a DC-3 up here in our liberated country’s atmosphere is Earth.
But the infinite black starry night with our Earth full of human beings loving one another and all the other loving Earths is heaven the kingdom of heaven.
So what did Novalis mean?
For me he is saying: breastfeeding a baby, a couple deeply caressing, holding hands, clasping a shoulder, human touching human, human skin meeting human skin is putting your finger on communism compañeros.
'Meditation in a DC-3' appears in Nicaraguan New Time (Journeyman Press, London 1988), translated by Dinah Livingstone. Felipe in the poem is Felipe Peña, a member of Ernesto Cardenal's peasant community in Solentiname, one of the sixty political prisoners released after the Assault on the Palace, killed during the Final Offensive in May 1979 in Nueva Guinea; his name appears on one of the crosses in the front cover painting.