Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández

Wind

Wind … fickle wind! It either coos gently or roars enraged. It knows how to be a breeze, to caress sensually and how to become a hurricane, to lash out ruthlessly. Today, whimsical wind, I have followed your course, far from the channeled prose of my banal street. I have seen you gracefully comb the jet-black hair of this girl who jealously beholds the golden locks of an ocean that drinks the sun’s dazzle in a blue dawn. And I have seen you beguile that little one crazily tangling up her long hair. I have seen you playfully tickle the soil´s fodder and the poplar leaves complacently casting a shade over the bronzed farmer´s decaying home. But I have also seen you ragingly ravish anything standing on your path. Friendly wind or hostile wind,

which will blow into my turbulent life? Will it be the one auspiciously pushing my feeble little boat to the longed-for port? Or will it be the tempest-driven one making my boat flounder? Wind … fickle wind!

Louise Howerow

A Question of Memory

reflections on a photo, Forchies, Belgium, 1950

When the two-year old left the road she found herself in a field of poppies, petals bruising black between her fingers. The poppy’s centre—stamens, anthers, filaments—and the words for naming she learned later. Like the words displaced, coal miners. Her parents say she imagined the field, how it existed, but only for them. And, yet, the girl will hold onto the slender poppies, the road flanked with two room cabins, their concrete seeping in cold. What the girl won’t remember is her mother standing beside her on the road, her father and his camera. All this un-remembering the girl keeps hidden. So, too, how beyond the road, she knew her first instance of joy, and it was coloured crimson.