PORTRAIT OF A MARRIAGE AS “LIBRARY AFTER AIR RAID, LONDON, 1940”
PORTRAIT OF A MARRIAGE AS “LIBRARY AFTER AIR RAID, LONDON, 1940”
By Cintia Santana
1.
Luck has left
the tidy shelves of books intact
and a leaded window in the back:
each square divided into
smaller, beveled panes. Defy
they say. Survive, survive.
2.
Three men in bowler hats
stand before the shelves and browse.
As if oblivious to the ruins of the house,
the terrors of the night, they study spines,
reflect. Wear woolen overcoats amidst the char.
A timber holds the standing walls apart.
3.
Under rubble, a ladder and a covered chair, crushed.
The archive, leather-bound and made to last.
What once was roof reveals the vastness
of the sky. Inside becomes outside
and everywhere the shock of light.
Cintia Santana teaches poetry and fiction workshops in Spanish, and literary translation courses at Stanford University. She is the author of Forth and Back: Translation, Dirty Realism, and the Spanish Novel (1985-2000). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Missouri Review, Pleiades, RHINO, The Threepenny Review, and other journals. Her poem, “Qasida of Grief,” was selected as the winner of the Sycamore Review’s 2013 Wabash Prize by C.D. Wright.