You came with strangers to trample the grassthat only knows our feetYou blinded the sunthat has only gazed on my footprintsyou slithered into the treesto try and trick usYou think the world too weakto escape your hateyou think the jungle too small to shelter usbecause you steal her colors to paint your clothesand use her leaves to hide from my brothers Ay invaderyou don’t care thatthis forest is our homeit is our mother and daughterwe know every inch of her skinjust by smelling her scentshe doesn’t want you inside herand soyou will have no peace Bedandalu’ ne ca dxd’ beeda guxhatañee. guixini runibiá’ ñeesiduBitaagulu’ lu gubidxani hauyuyadxí si xtuuba’ ñee’ne birendalu’ ladi yaga sica ti beenda’ti nalu’ zacá zagui’tu laduZa’cuxou’ qui zuganda guidxilayú diti guixaledu ra nul guendananala’dxi stiu’nalu’ gasti gui’xhi’ gusigapa guendanabaniti lii gula’nalu xquendanaga’ ne bitieelu’ xhabalu’ne riquiiñelu’ xpandaga ti gucaachica’ lii Ahhh dxu’rului’ qui gannu’rari’ nga lixidu’ndi’ nga jñaadu nè xiiñidupa chu’ xiidu xinaxi sti’racabia’hu guidubinaca ladine laabe qui racala’dxibe lii ndaanibenga runiaui susaanabe lii gasidxilu’ Llegaste con los extraños a pisar la hierbaque sólo conoce nuestros piesCubriste los ojos del solque sólo mis huellas ha miradoy tu cuerpo de serpiente enredaste en los árbolespara tratar de engañarnosCrees que no bastará la faz del mundopara escapar de tu odiopiensas que no habrá selva capaz de guarder la vidaporque tú le has rabdo los colores para pintar to trajey usas sus hojas para esconderte de mis hermanos Aaah soldadopretendes ignorarque es nestra casaque est nuestra madre ye nuestra hijacon sólo sentir su aromapodemos reconocer cada parte de su piely ella no te quiere en sus entrañaspor esola paz de tu sueño ahuyentará
[You came with strangers to trample the grass]
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From Stolen Flower by Irma Pineda, translated by Wendy Call. Published by Yale University Press in the Margellos World Republic of Letters series in November 2025. Reproduced by permission.
Wendy Call
Irma Pineda is an Isthmus Zapotec poet, translator, educator, and Indigenous rights activist. She has two previous collections of poetry in Wendy Call’s English translation: In the Belly of Night and Other Poems and Nostalgia Doesn’t Flow Away Like Riverwater. She lives in Oaxaca, Mexico.
Axel Rivera
Wendy Call is the author, co-editor, or translator of eight books and two chapbooks, including the annual Best Literary Translations anthology. Together with Irma Pineda, she received the 2022 John Frederick Nims Prize in Translation, for poems from Stolen Flower. A residency at the University of Iowa and a grant from Cornell University allowed her to complete that book’s translation. She teaches nonfiction in the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA.
In 2007, Mexican soldiers raped and left for dead a seventy-three-year-old Indigenous Nahua woman, Ernestina Ascencio Rosario, as she worked in her cornfield. The courts ruled that Ascencio died of natural causes. When journalists investigated, they discovered numerous village girls, as young as twelve, who also had been raped by soldiers. The reports sparked outrage throughout Latin America over gender-based violence, oppression of Indigenous communities, and military impunity. Stolen Flower is Irma Pineda’s powerful sequence of poems memorializing these events and their ramifications. The poems, which appear here in the original Didxazá (Isthmus Zapotec), Spanish, and English, are a chorus of fictionalized voices: Ascencio herself, the land, and the community grapple with the terror. It is a lament and a call to action, refashioning the testimonio into a tribute to Mexico’s Indigenous peoples and their lands, cultures, and languages.
“Irma Pineda’s incantatory collection speaks truth to power in a voice that is prophetic, haunting, and hallucinatory, yet always brimming with humane compassion. Call’s translations are translucent and cutting as glass, offering these poems that already live in twinned bodies of Didxazá and Spanish the clear-eyed vision of a third.”
—Michael Bazzett, translator of If Today Were Tomorrow, selected poems of Humberto Ak’abal
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