intimations of mortality

Ana Mendieta, Isla (Silueta series, 1981)

The Image

When I understood the terrible thing:
that her body had gone bad,
dry, spoiled, mutilated,
I made an image of my love;
not the comfortable image
that a poet would put on a shelf in a tower,
but one that would grow big in the Desert,
where blood would be water.


Sorley MacLean, From Wood to Ridge: Collected Poems in Gaelic and English Translation (Manchester: Carcanet, 1999), p. 191.