The dark has taken root on all four walls

By and | 2 February 2001
Translated with Peter Boyle


“The dark has taken root on all four walls”

— Kevin Hart, ‘Room’





Holding fast to this line of Kevin Hart

through their deep roots I enter

the experience of those prison days.

Once more I walk the heart’s split road.





Wall One


The body’s routine is crucified by the dark

as I receive my political sentence.

I grasp these memories tightly

like a line on the cell wall farewelling an unending day.





Wall Two


In the dark the wakeful mind can’t distinguish

sleep from dream.

All I can feel is how I am bound

to the mountain’s sheer most difficult rockface.

I hold on to the roots of memory

once more with no shout, no howl of humanity,

only my wounded mind enters that darkness

to gather fragments of my most private battle.





Wall Three


I sever the roots of my sentence, plant seeds of love,

once more rise up to ancient fragrance of creation,

leave behind my actor’s mask in the street theatre of 1976

on the stagedrop of pure air.


I am here with all my body,

all my life

opening the light that comes from one in solitary confinement

on dictatorship’s cell wall.





Wall Four


I wake up smothered in darkness

yet sheltered by the prayers of my grandparents and mother.

I receive the morning breeze

like a resurrection from all the wounds that set their roots

down in my life.


Outside, immense rain falls on the enduring face of the dark I was.
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Juan Garrido Salgado was born in Chile and was a political prisoner under the Pinochet regime. He now lives in Adelaide. He has published three books of poetry, and his poems have been published in Chile, Colombia, Spain, El Salvador, Brazil, Europe, New Zealand and Australia. He has also translated into Spanish works from John Kinsella, Mike Ladd, Judith Beveridge, Dorothy Porter and MTC Cronin, including Talking to Neruda’s Questions. He has translated five Aboriginal poets for Espejo de Tierra/Earth Mirror Poetry Anthology. With Steve Brock and Sergio Holas, Garrido-Salgado also translated into English the trilingual Mapuche Poetry Anthology, and has translated many of Lionel Fogorty’s poems into Spanish. He is currently working on the Spanish translation of a selection of Jumoke Verissimo’s poems, to be read at the Granada International Poetry Festival in Nicaragua.

More by Juan Garrido Salgado on Cordite Poetry Review →
Peter Boyle is a Sydney-based poet and translator of poetry. He holds a Masters Degree in Spanish and Latin American Studies from the University of New South Wales and a Doctorate in Creative Arts from the University of Western Sydney. He has published ten books of poetry and nine books as a translator of poetry from Spanish. His most recent collections are Ideas of Travel and Notes Towards the Dreambook of Endings (Vagabond Press, 2022 and 2021). In 2020, his book Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness won the New South Wales Premier’s Award for Poetry. His book Ghostspeaking also received the New South Wales Premier’s Award in 2017. He has performed his poetry at International Poetry Festivals in Canada, France, Colombia, Venezuela, Macedonia, Nicaragua and El Salvador. As a translator his books include Anima and No Known Cause by Cuban poet José Kozer, The Trees: Selected Poems of Eugenio Montejo, and Three Poets: Olga Orozco, Marosa Di Giorgio and Jorge Palma. His translations of French poets René Char, Pierre Reverdy, Yves Bonnefoy and Max Jacob have appeared in journals and anthologies in the USA. In 2013 he was awarded the New South Wales Premier’s Award for Literary Translation.

More by Peter Boyle on Cordite Poetry Review →

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