Poetry
Al Cerro Ancón
Not translated into English
Amelia Denis de Icaza · 1906
Synopsis
Twelve quatrains addressed to the Cerro Ancón, the hill in Panama now forbidden to Panamanians. The woman who speaks no longer recognises the place of her childhood: a foreigner has trodden its ground, the stream has run dry, and she asks what became of the tree on which she had carved her name. She recalls that the hill gave her her lyre and received her dreams of love, that she called on it in her sorrows, and she speaks of the years spent far from the “queen of two worlds”, dreaming of returning to kneel on its soil.
Context
The poem was written in Panama in 1906, during a stay by its author, then seventy years old, after the separation from Colombia and the cession to the United States of the canal zone, from which Panamanians were excluded. According to La Estrella de Panamá, her daughter Julia found it among her papers and had it taken to Guillermo Andreve, who published it the same year in the weekly El Heraldo del Istmo; the chronicler Felipe Argote, on the contrary, says it first appeared in the posthumous collection Hojas secas, printed in 1927 in the Nicaraguan city of León. Twelve quatrains, forty-eight lines, with alternate rhymes.
Who it is for
A short poem, in Spanish, with no published translation, readable on Wikisource; it is as well to know that the hill then lay in territory conceded to the United States.
Prizes and reception
The poem by which its author has remained in the memory of her country; a bronze statue of her has been erected at the summit of the hill it celebrates.
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