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Go shoppingTranslated by Peter Bush
Mammal with Flea
I God, the mammal,
look agog at the universe and invisible things
and at the flea on the belly of my dog.
Will she too look at me
with the same spiritual contentment?
And take a chance on the hypothesis
of trismegistic universes?
Suddenly feel an infinite desire for love
and call it God? God, God.
Call it God in a canticle
for the microbes lying still on the flea’s belly
up, down, as far as my hand or even further?
Will the flea feel infinite power
on the belly of my dog?
Think of destroying the forest of long, soft hairs
that autumn plucks and fills my flat with flakes?
Think of nuclear war?
Feel the Westernness of the void of centuries?
Will the flea consult a psychotherapist or psychiatrist
when she intuits she’s beholden to the gaze of another?
Will the flea blame her father and mother for her neurosis?
Or call me Goddess? Or even worse:
call my dog Goddess, or think
she’s the daughter of my dog?
Will she too ask stupid questions like me?
And crucify other fleas?
Anthem for a Siesta Rambo
(Universal Prayer)
Lift up your hearts… lift up your bums!
Lift your bums off those chairs, sons of the Sow!
Lift your bodies off those sofas, you couch potatoes!
And, if you can’t because you’re too stuffed with vitamins,
walk with your sofa stuck to your bum, you siesta Rambos,
like a snail, in a huff, like a snail, carry your house.
Arise from the grave, you multimedia suckers,
leprous consumers of the American dream.
Arise from this cloister, this big cathedral,
enclosed order of the 21st century. Men enclosed.
Eat the mystery of the excrement,
expelled by the materialist intestine
from the belly of the dollar cow.
Lift your bums off spongy lies, sons of the Sow!
Smell the air polluted by your shit.
Wallow like pigs in the great dunghill of life. Wallow in there.
Here we go…
Dolors Miquel, born in Lleida, has published several books of poetry including ‘Trucker’s Haiku’ (1999) and recently ‘The woman who watched the telly’ (2010) and an anthology of medieval Catalan verse, No one to be seen (2010). She has won the Gabriel Ferrat and Ciutat de Barcelona Prizes and feels immensely privileged to be a woman writing in a nation that doesn’t exist and in a language that is always being questioned.
