In an address to the reader, Nancy Morejón describes her collection of poems in With Eyes and Soul: Images of Cuba as well as her approach to writing poetry as follows:
These poems were written between the summers of 1986 and 1987. Some of them are not quite the poems they were intended to be. They are prose poems, vignettes, whatever you prefer to call them, placed at the service of the photgraphic images that the artist Milton Rogovin has created from the comings and goings of Cubans in their everyday milieu. Most of these texts were born from that flash of light in which the poetess sometimes loses her identity, and where the reader always reigns as a noble king . . . Writing poetry with this idea of applied work, like someone who embroiders a tablecloth to be used by her loved ones, raises one's spirits and enriches one's understanding. This is poetry of effort and pleasure, of function and flavor, of words thrown to the winds with signs of love firmly fixed in their native soil.
Here's "Hora de la verdad (IX)" (Hour of Truth IX) -- taken from With Eyes and Soul: Images of Cuba:
Y canto en Cuba. Canto en mi lengua para siempre.
Pasan los jóvenes con sus melenas rojas cernidas por el viento de la Revolución, con su proa al sol de nuestro Nuevo Mundo. Y nado sobre la ciudad. Y sobre el azul de la ciudad, y sobre la vicisitud habida de la ciudad. Y sobre su última generación . Y construimos y construimos por encima del aislamiento y de la usura.
Yo quiero estar aquí. Cruzando puentes, ríos, centrífugas. Me baño en níquel: --Desentierro la lengua del pájaro. Qué lindo mi país.
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And I sing in Cuba.
Sing in my native tongue forever.
Young people pass by with their tufts of red hair floating in the wind of Revolution, its prow turned to the sun of our New World.
And I swim above the city.
And above the blue of the city, and above the sudden change in the city. And above its latest generation. And we’re building and building, higher than our isolation, higher than their profiteering. Here’s where I want to be. Crossing bridges, rivers, centrifuges. I dip myself in nickel: --I unearth the bird’s tongue. How lovely is my land.
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