The New Guest

The New Gest

By Magaly Quiñones

The New Gest

If Cervantes did live by this century´s end he would create a Quixote-guerrilla man, a rare individual, dangerous, a long-bearded form. If he were born in this poor land, nearby America's shore, legend would tell of a peasant leader, or a denizen worker, one of those who carry machetes in their sleeves, known by the name of John or Peter.

And on a sun-bathed morn, at full blast, occupied by mercenary bandits, inhabited by rapid-fire guns, made of assailers and sonambulisticc drug-addicts, of military myrmidons in ambush, the marginated craze one, the new hero, would dawn-crossed the cities, insulted and shackled like a vulgar modern galley slave.

We should have to commence... Homeless, without frontiers, kneaded bread with his own hands, no dame, no leather shield, no escutcheon, no helmet, saved sweating all his possessions and mine, did not ride on horseback nor on a carriage, there he lived and grew up spiritually, his Fatherland being his valor and sacrifice.... Or we had to say... In blood, not hail, man of sorrows, the chosen one, who put in the arms of Lady Luck, the future of his natural profession, left the galaxy lurking place and arrived in our world, the Caribbean, and sadly interned himself in lightless galleys, in forests demolished by mourning, in average poverty settlements.

I, knowing it, saw him descending like a stone to the river. I, perceiving it, saw him defying the most fiery splendor... If it were possible, if poetry were the focal point of the struggle, the skin of the blaze, if it remained the flower, the chant, the bone, America would have a new gest, and it would roam on all lips, solid like all her idols, searching for the air of her heart, precipitating enemies like stars over the vibration of the Word...

he lived and grew up spiritually

Magaly Quinones. Puerto Rico, 1945. Books published: Between My Voice and Time, 1969, It Was That the World Was, 1974, Zumbayllu, 1976, Singing to the Night Itself, 1978, Things of Poets, 1978, In the Little Antilles, 1982, Naming, 1986, Reason for Struggle, Reason for Love, 1989, Sueños de Papel, 1986, Backyard, 2003, My World, My World, 2004, I Want a Blue Night, 2007, Lullaby to the Child Jesus, 2008, Poems for the little ones, 2006, Passion and Freedom, 2008, The Doll, 2013, Bilingual Anthology of Selected Poems, 2017.