Tik'ha Takiy | Song to the Flowers

Elvira Espejo Ayca is an award winning poet, visual artist, weaver, and narrator of the indigenous Aymara and Quechua oral traditions of her home region of Oruro (Qaqachaka ayllu community), Bolivia. She is the director of the National Museum of Ethnography and Folklore in La Paz and was awarded the Goethe Medal in 2020. Alison Krögel is an associate professor of Quechua and Andean Studies at the University of Denver and the editor of the digital Quechua poetry collective, Musuq Illa. Editorial note: From Kaypi jaqhaypi / Por aquí, por allá (Lima: Pakarina Ediciones, 2017), © Elvira Espejo Ayca. WORLDLIT.ORG 29 Tik’ha Takiy | Song to the Flowers by Elvira Espejo Ayca Visit worldlit.org to listen to the authors read their poem in Quechua and to read the poems in Quechua and Spanish. Oh mallow root, mallow root across these windswept heights, my lover roams Once young, the sun was on the rise and now, the sun descends The clouds advance, the winds they swell The people come, from sorrows they come With the rains they come, with the winds they come and thus, for you, they come Across the sapphire river, across the Pukara plain In search of you I shall walk on, and so, walk on Near here, chikaylla you might come So far, karumanta, you can’t wish to flee Could that be you, just there behind me? and me here still searching for you And I will go downriver And I will go upriver Where my love shall I find you? Traversing the pampas of Oruro crossing Bolivia searching, gathering just dahlias weeping, walking I shall leave Oruro now my woven aguayo lost carrying cloth for all things what reason to remain? And high above, Condor soars his white shawl tightly tied above sacred Illimani’s peak he ascends Where is it now he is off to? And so you are my only And so I am yours only And so we shall be together weeping on I shall steal you away, leading you Within my heart, leading you away . . . Translation from the Quechua By Alison Krögel

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