Translated from the Spanish by Dinah Livingstone
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.
On Pope John Paul II’s visit to Nicaragua in 1983, when poet, priest and Minister of Culture Ernesto Cardenal met the pope at the airport, John Paul II wagged a disapproving finger at him. In 1985 Rome suspended the Catholic priests in the Sandinista government from their priesthood, including Ernesto. His poem above was written shortly after the 1979 triumph of the Sandinista Revolution, which overthrew the dictator Somoza. This translation is published in Nicaraguan New Time, poems by Ernesto Cardenal, translated by Dinah Livingstone (Journeyman Press, London 1988).