Another one from the masses--anonymous or brief until i can get a computer at home, a couple months from now. Have become so addicted to reading all these poetry/literature blogs, I figured I would add to the chaos. I hope to post notes on Venezuelan poets I'm interested in, as well as occasional translations of their work into English. At the moment I've been thinking a lot about Juan Sanchez Pelaez (Altagracia de Orituco, Guarico, Venezuela, 1922), who wrote:

" Drenched in magic, my blood flows
toward you beneath dawn's prophecy."

For now, won't be able to include accents etc. I'll stumble through this until I can get past this feeling of talking to a machine. More on JSP later.

" He wanted to tell me something, and we went off a little way by ourselves. We were both pretty drunk, and we just stood around out there in the dark, listening. I guess we were thinking the same thing. I don't know what he wanted to say. I guess he wanted ME to say something first, so I started to talk about the way it was going to be. We had some plans about that. We were going to meet someplace, maybe in a year or two, maybe more. He was going home, and he was going to be all right again. And someday I was going home, too, and we were going to meet some place out there on the reservation and get drunk together. It was going to be the last time, and it was something we had to do. We were going out into the hills on horses and alone. It was going to be early in the morning, and we were going to see the sun coming up. It was going to be good again, you know? We were going to get drunk for the last time, and we were going to sing the old songs. We were going to sing about the way it used to be, how there was nothing all around but the hills and the sunrise and the clouds. We were going to be drunk and, you know, peaceful--beautiful. We had to do it a certain way, just right, because it was going to be the last time."
{N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn, 1968}