A VOICE OF HOMELANDS AND DIASPORAS.

   There is
   a country in the world
                               situated
   right in the sun's path.
   A native of the night.
                               Situated
   in an improbable archipelago
   of sugar and alcohol.
                               Simply
   light,
                    like a bat's wing
   leaning on the breeze.
                               Simply
   bright,
         like the trace of a kiss on an elderly
   maiden,
           or daylight on the roof tiles.
                                          Simply
   fruitful. Fluvial. And material. And yet
   simply torrid, abused and kicked
   like a young girl's hips.
   Simply sad and oppressed.
   Sincerely wild and uninhabited.

                                                  --Pedro Mir

Mir's best known works date from the period of his exile. He published in Cuba Hay un pais en el mundo (1949) [There Is a Country in the World, 1993], the first of his major long poems, the same year that he completed the essay "Tres leyendas de colores," an illuminating exploration of the historical roots of Dominican and Caribbean cultural identities, followed by Contracanto a Walt Whitman (1952) [Countersong to Walt Whitman, 1993] and Seis momentos de esperanza (1953), both published in Guatemala. Back home, where in the 1960s his public readings attracted crowds of thousands of workers and students, Mir continued to write, publishing four volumes of poetry, including Amen de mariposas (1969) [Amen to Butterflies, 1993], triggered by Trujillo's brutal assassination of the Mirabal sisters, and Huracan Neruda (1975), inspired by the deaths of Neruda and Allende in 1973, plus two novels, a book of short fiction, three volumes on aesthetics, and four books of historical interpretation. In 1994 Siglo XXI Editores published Poesias (casi) completas, Mir's collected poems edited by the Mexican poet Jaime Labastida, who had first introduced Mir's verse to a wide Latin American audience in Viaje a la muchedumbre (1972), the slim selection he prepared for the same publisher twenty-two years earlier. After his eightieth birthday, Mir received numerous honors, including the National Prize for Literature, his country's highest literary distinction. By then, his work had become closely identified with the authentic expression of the Dominican people's national sentiment and with the deepest yearnings of the wretched of the earth.

"He understood the plight of people," New York scholar Aida Ortiz-Cruz recalls, "especially children who lose their familiar surroundings, where they belong."

Silvio Torres-Saillant is professor of English at Syracuse University and director of the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute, City College of New York. Poem excerpt is from "There Is a Country in the World," by Pedro Mir, from Countersong to Walt Whitman and Other Poems by Pedro Mir, a bilingual volume published by Azul Editions, 1993, Washington D. C. Translations by Jonathan Cohen and Donald D. Walsh.