Peter Newman Traducción: Jorge Javier Romero The Others

THE OTHERS

Multicoloured mosaic, faraway countries— Child, I stare at a flattened map, elbow on table, chin cupped in hand; so many places, I cry— I’ll never get to see them all.

Fifty years’ work in the patchwork with Black, brown, white, Arab, Jew and I, doctor now, still stare, but at a spherical globe. My finger drifts light along its surface, circling out, around, sliding easily over blurred borders, boundary end-lines dissolved in living’ s freer verse—

Encircling again the globe’ s merging colours, those labels gone; my stethoscope beats with the same human hearts.

—Peter Newman