Translated from Spanish by Felipe Q. Quintanilla

Yaxkin Melchy Ramos-Yupari is a poet, researcher, translator of Japanese poetry, and editor. Mexican-born, with Peruvian and Quechua heritage, he holds a Ph.D. in Humanities from the University of Tsukuba (2023) and a Master’s degree in Asian and African Studies, specializing in Japan, from El Colegio de México (2018). Since 2015, he has focused on ecopoetics from a “heart-based” perspective, drawing on the relational designs of Indigenous peoples of the Americas and East Asia. He resides in Ibaraki, Japan.

The city of Tsukuba is located north of Tokyo, near the Sakura-gawa River and Lake Kasumigaura, the second-largest freshwater lake in Japan. Although there is a reliable supply of drinking water for the population, river floods and inundations are recurrent. Much of the riverbeds have been channeled between concrete walls, and in some areas, waste management is a problem. Small streams sing in the nearby mountains, among them Mina-no-gawa, the river of man and woman, a watercourse that has been poetized for over a thousand years.

This poem was written through a practice of meditation and taikyokuken (also known as t’ai chi chuan) in the Vivero de Coyoacán Park, in the south of Mexico City, and was completed while the author was living in Japan. Despite the displacement, the poem remains geographically and spiritually connected by the same river of the firmament, the Hatun Mayu, or Milky Way; Milky Way is its astronomical name in the West, and Hatun Mayu as it is known to the Indian heart.

Acknowledging that I am a poet, a child of Andean migrants and scientists, who no longer speaks the mountain Quechua of my grandmothers, my poetics looks deeper into the Indigenous heart as an ecological heart that can communicate and resonate in the East. The celestial river of life is called Hatun Mayu in the Andes and Ama-no-gawa in the Japanese islands. The heart that becomes tender through contemplation and gratitude can remember the life that permeates the waters of heaven and earth, reconnecting with the origin of the sweet song (that my grandmothers used to sing while carrying water from the puquio, the spring). With that song, the black waters of the heart can be healed, restoring the ear and the voice that speaks with the territories. For, wherever it is that a human being might be, the dialogue that does not erase itself, can always be reborn.