Spanish version of this poem: "Tristeza en las aguas del Río del la Plata"
The Sorrow in the Waters of the Río De La Plata
From 1977 to 1978, every Wednesday, a plane departed base militar aérea el Palomar at 34° 36' S latitude, 58°37' W longitude heading east for the Atlantic over the village miserias in Partido de Tres de Febrero, over Villa Santos, Villa Saenz, and Villa Devoto with shacks of scraps and glinting tin roofs, then along Avenida San Martin, Avenida Corrientes, above rehearsals at Teatro Colón, over the strollers in the Plaza de Mayo, the financiers in the Banco Central de la República Argentina, the priests in the Catedral Metropolitana, and, finally, past Playa Municipal, the last land of the city of Santa Maria del Buen Aire (St. Mary of the Good Air), before crossing the Río de La Plata and reaching the Current of the South Atlantic where schools of tuna chase herring and hake, squid feed on clouds of shrimp, and the Argentine Abyssal Plain is a calcerous floor of foramineral ooze. Here the plane yielded its load to the sea - as if casting flowers onto the waves. Every Thursday, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, flanked by the Casa Rosada and the Catedral Metropolitana, a shout from Congreso Nacional and Zero-kilometre Point, not far from the ristorantes of La Boca, the bright, gay colors of the wooden houses, in the midst of congested traffic and hurtling colectivos, before the movie theaters of Avenida Corrientes and Calle Lavalle blazed with light at night, ignoring the peñas on open air stages, the call of the Galeria Calle Florida, the espacios verdes, cried out - "We can taste the flavor of our missing children in the water of the city from the Río de La Plata!" At night, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo dreamt of young girls in white dresses with blue ribbons in their hair who would never be. Falling through the air, free of convention, free of restraint, they could only sleep the sleep of poppies, but when carmine, bright with the good air of the porteños, mixed with the inevitable aqua-marine, did the Atlantic, never colder than 51°F, bless them with time to recollect the dark, friable soil of the Pampas, the fields of waving wheat, the warmth of maté on gray, damp winter days, the mestizos chasing wild horses and criollo cattle on once open ranges of the estancias, the weight of Uncle's casket on the shoulder, and how free their songs of freedom rang in the Northwest Andes? Here, in this land, where sin and absolution are ritualized on Wednesdays and Thursdays, the President must profess Catholicism, and the naval commander who slept in public plazas confessed that not until almost falling with the flowers over the sea did he realize he was killing human beings, the hand of God is light. Brandywine 4/5/95