If I were a swift, a swift among swifts, I’d go to sleep in a trice. When a swift falls asleep it keeps on flying: to heal its wounds, the air a salve. Beating its wings to throw off raindrops: love, they say, is made in heaven. ‘There’s no other way’ they inform us and us, poor things, captives of Earth … Earth is a heavy heaven, light earth the sky; no matter what happens choose birdsong. Heaven and earth, the centre’s branches: we swing in the trees, us nonconformists. Up to the branches don’t touch the ground, with the tip of a finger pierce violet cloud. Since the sky has muddied your fingertip, now let me taste the mulberry there. Where does this song come from and what is hobbled? If we’re waking or sleeping is hard to know ... Born crying and by our calling black we do resemble the swift in that. Life midway it’s strange how it is, to try with one eye to conclude this song.
By Harkaitz Cano
Translated by Elizabeth Macklin
THE SWIFT
by Harkaitz Cano
Translated by Elizabeth Macklin
Published by Zart (2019)
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Harkaitz Cano is a Basque poet, translator and writer of short stories, novels, poetry, chronicles and children’s and youth literature. He has won the Imajina Ezazu Euskadi award, the Donostia Hiria award and the Ignacio Aldecoa Award. He has won the Euskadi Literature Award twice: in 2005 for Belarraren ahoa and in 2012 for Twist.
Elizabeth Macklin is the author of You’ve Just Been Told and A Woman Kneeling in the Big City and the
translator of Kirmen Uribe’s works, including his novel, Bilbao–New York–Bilbao. Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry and an Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, which she spent in Bilbao, Spain.