The Parrots

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My friend Michel is an army officer
in Somoto up near the Honduran border,
and he told me he had found some contraband parrots
waiting to be smuggled to the United States
to learn to speak English there.

There were 186 parrots
with 47 already dead in their cages.
He drove them back where they’d been taken from
and as the lorry approached a place known as The Plains
near the mountains which were these parrots’ home
(behind those plains the mountains stand up huge)
the parrots got excited, started beating their wings
and shoving against their cage-sides.

When the cages were let open
they all shot out like an arrow shower
straight for their mountains.

The Revolution did the same for us I think:
It freed us from the cages
where they trapped us to talk English,
it gave us back the country
from which we were uprooted,
their green mountains restored to the parrots
by parrot-green comrades.

But there were 47 that died.

~Ernesto Cardenal~

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Ernesto Cardenal, poet, revolutionary, Sandanista, Minister of Culture in the revolutionary government which came to power in Nicaragua in 1979 after deposing the dictator Somoza. Ernesto Cardenal, Catholic priest, who defied Pope John Paul’s orders to disassociate himself with the Sandanistas to stand by his people.

There was this poem of his which had these two beautiful lines:

We have always wanted something beyond what we wanted

and

The bourgeois begins to go astray at his mother’s breast

Today I post these poems by Nicanor Parra and Ernesto Cardenal to celebrate the victory of the Sandanistas in Nicaragua, to celebrate the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela, to cheer the first Aymara Indian, Evo Morales, to become the President of Bolivia…

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