Maria Teresa Ogliastri

is a Venezuelan poet and writer. She has authored 4 books of poetry, most recently Polo Sur (2008), and a novel soon to be released. She has been featured at poetry festivals throughout Central and South America. Ogliastri holds a doctorate in philosophy and resides in Caracas.

Patricia B. Fisher is a linguist, translator, and Spanish instructor living in Columbia, Maryland.

Yvette Neisser Moreno is a poet and translator. Her translation of Argentinean Luis Alberto Ambroggio’s Difficult Beauty: Selected Poems was published by Cross-Cultural Communications in 2009.

The translators say: "This poem is from Ogliastri’s book Polo Sur (South Pole), a book-length sequence of poems tracing an imaginary journey—both physical and emotional—from  the Colombian jungle to the South Pole."

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Anything to Tell Me I'm Near

by Maria Teresa Ogliastri

    Translated from Spanish by Patricia B. Fisher & Yvette Neisser Moreno

Sailing without a bluff in sight

I examine the sky

and wait for the message

with all I know enveloped in doubt

I can’t stop thinking that birds’ songs

are just another way to multiply silence

the length of the storms

varies with my mood

which goes from brokenhearted to irate

if there were at least an iceberg

a polar cap

anything to tell me I’m near

but all I can see on this steppe

is a white brilliance

white on white

absence

and more absence