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Special N.01 – Martin Harrison Special Issue

I am your reader twice Sur

by Juan Garrido-Salgado

Martin Harrison I am one of your reader with new arrival accent.

I am political prisoner from Chile.

We are lost in the city

even the birds consume the charity.

My heart doesn’t fly anymore.

I have got a comfort cage to spent time and obligations.

Happiness is a homeless without a park to sleep

To be able to dream it is it very expensive matter.

 

So much already vanished, you said

muchas cosas ya han desaparecido.

Martin Harrison I am telling you I am one of your reader

if I am not writing in my tongue it will vanished/desaparecer

the smell of my childhood I only taste in my dream.

 

I feel I grow up as a native tree in this city

I don’t understand your language

 

Your accent is an electric saw

cutting

bark and body into pieces.

My place is here on earth

And I can see the sky as a river

where my leaves jumped it as fish

and where seeds became stones

playing the melodies of silence.

Disforestation of this time across my ancient roots.

 

I am your reader Martin Harrison

I inhabitant of new vowels and consonants

From Pablo Neruda and Lionel Fogarty

as an ecosystem of life and death to share in this earth.

My connection with Martin’s poetry was always as a reader in my development to be a bilingual poet in Australia. It was a very deep process to learn, and to keep my heritage and culture alive.

Published: September 2015
Juan Garrido-Salgado

as born in Chile and was a political prisoner under the Pinochet regime. He now lives in Adelaide. He has published four books of poetry, and his poems have been published in Chile, Colombia, Spain, El Salvador, Brazil, 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. He is a co-translator of this anthology. He has translated many of Lionel Fogarty’s poems into Spanish. Juan is the co-translator with Sergio Holas and Steve Brock of the Trilingual Mapuche Poetry Anthology (Interactive Press), 2015.

An Australian and international
journal of ecopoetry and ecopoetics.

Plumwood Mountain Journal is created on the unceded lands of the Gadigal and Wangal people of the Eora Nation. We pay our respects to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and to elders past, present and future. We also acknowledge all traditional custodians of the lands this journal reaches.

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