This poem is taken from PN Review 283, Volume 51 Number 5, May - June 2025.

Poems
Translated by Richard Gwyn

Piedad Bonnett
Prayer

For my days I ask of you, Lord
of the shipwrecks,
not water for my thirst, but thirst; not
dreams
but the desire for dreams. For
my nights,
all the darkness that is necessary to
drown my own darkness.


Scars

There is no scar, however brutal it might appear,
that does not enclose beauty.
It recounts a timely story,
tells something of pain. But also of its end.
Scars, then, are the stitches of
memory,
an imperfect conclusion that heals us, as
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