Invasion Day 2

By | 1 May 2018
For Ali Cobby Eckerman & Lionel Fogarty


I slept last night within your kiss and woke up invaded by a stroking hand.

On our patio last night Ali & Lionel talked about dreams and reality;

A conversation of spirit and friends who find they are united by love and dignity.

We are expatriate voices,

Tortured birds that write poems for liberation.

Lionel writes verses against terra nullius

& Ali has kissed the flesh of her sister who flew above the earth.

Juan is still reading his poem ‘I look like an Aboriginal’.

Around the table the candles light our faces and the wind plays with the flames.

Our bodies are embracing the smoke of words; tongues tangling

With accents of life & exile.

We are surviving the words & accents of struggle and resistance;

The sound of English is not a celebration.

We are birds trapped in the broken branches of the flesh of the ancestors’ sorrow.

Here we are, in unity, just a night away from Invasion Day.

Candles illuminate the accent of our laughter.

The smoke is lost in the sky. We laugh. We are warriors and poets.

We are brothers and sisters in this invaded land.

We are pulling out the Mayan calendar for 2012.

We are going to die and be born again in our common struggle for freedom.
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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 →

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