Born in Valparaíso, Chile in 1947 is a Chilean poet and the founder of poetic transrealism in contemporary poetry, who had spent a long period of his early years in exile after Pinochet’s coup in 1973. Badilla Castillo resides in Santiago where he
continues to write and teach. His work has appeared with English translations in three books, La cabeza de la Medusa / The Medusa’s head (2012) and Espectros y Sombras / Ghosts and shadows (2013), and The Library at Ephesus (2014) in French he has come into poetic sight wirh Ville assiégée (2010). Besides he has been published in several anthologies also in Swedish, Italian, Finnish, Hindi, Turkish, and Dutch.
St. Petersburg
I have seen Joseph Brodsky on a corner of old Leningrad
looking at the swollen Neva river with his drooping eyes
head bowed, shabby as if he wanted to go back to some distant boundary beneath a pale winter sun.
A group of kids with a boombox turned all the way up passes him
and under his moving feet – crunching
sewers hidden by a mantle of hard snow
A gust of wind bends the masts of a hidden brigantine
unbound, it bobs and slams against ice fragments
The straits of the eastern Baltic that run between islands are frozen
and the snow troubles and darkens the memory
of the migrant who has no home.
Sailors celebrate their exploits with vodka and beer
after a long trip
The chimney of the family home’s is sending up a thick cloud of smoke.
Only fire melts this winter’s arrogance!
The bar girls laugh and lift their anise-filled glasses
A young Argonaut loses his composure and wanders drunk through the tables
He imagines the women nude as nymphs in the middle of a forest
A dark room waits for me tonight:
during long hours of insomnia
your blond hair cascading will be absent
in these antagonistic lands that in all innocence I once loved
Again this morning I have seen
Joseph Brodsky on a corner of old Leningrad
melancholy and dirty as if he wanted to return to some distant certainty beneath a pale winter sun.