(On learning Manuel Ocaranza died)
Look at it! It’s black! It’s bleak! It’s hunger
is piqued. Those are her sickle teeth; her mouth;
the dried winds of breath; her tread swallows
orchard and rain forest; as women
men. Come out those in hiding, my dear friends,
son of my heart, my dear family!
A mere glimpse of her burns; blind as hunger blinds
soul and eyes terrible is death’s hunger!
Not the generous and forgiving friend
lowering walls for the prisoner soul
to open toward the pleasing blue clearing
not the sweet nor the placid redemptive
sadness of those saddened taking body
like an empty orchard, bringing the soul,
in its grief, up to the highest garden
where the pale moonlight forever shines,
only white roses will grow of the shoots
not my longed-for wife nor my eternal
absent mother whose wide arms hang their hug
over the whole solemn environment,
and open to her children, a severe
form of living. And to rest and repair
imbalances, the clash and new battle,
reclines its igneous heads on the pure
and the joyful breast of the aurora.
No; as the left hand of the creator
enveloped in cloud and in sonorous
position over the skies and the peaks;
even where the borders divide between
colossal elaborate mountains
whose maker possesses tundra-shaping
hands formed by the rays and the deafening
pounding as soft clay injures stone;
stretching the boundary of a huge cup
from which eternal peace finally drinks,
the Evil like an insect, its dark rings
move and its antenna probes arteries
belonging to drinkers of sediment!
Death is a servant: servant of the hushed
Creator of life: People are Secret
Saviors! And more so is the igneous
owner of servants who gives them orders
implacably until they surrender
even their future breath to the happy
shadow of a myrtle tree made of gold,
good and evil go to combat in the breast;
and only eternal roses encircle
he in whose very eyes the grim
of the convulsive final battle rests.
The pious whose dried forehead in that breast
of strength, finds no Death, no pain, a big kiss.
And in the gentle Death of Death itself.
Evil and good conspire! Oh rude self,
toward rebellion and admiration
I am moved by the mystery of pain,
what punishment is the guilt of living,
of painful tenacity, our martyr!
Is it by chance your breast that the beauty
and pleasure of overcoming the beast
I enjoy as alive as martyrdom
is a small price for its final delight?
Hour so tremendous and criminal
for one in which your so generous breast
hunger burned, and placed in illustrious
hand of a friend, that dried one of yours!
No, no that such victims your business
populates its shadow! Tired ruins
lax ancestors and lazy warriors
it’s your duty to populate shadows,
and in your breast remake an old person
of wasted life to give weak soldiers armor.
Greater are the workshops of creators.
Oh Death! I’ve been reserved for your hungers!
I’ve been stolen; robbed and the only home,
its entire population is pulled
on horses as its solitary friend’s
enormously pained gestures shakes away,
the quieted shadow through the clamor!
Tell me, ignoble thief, speak the darkness
of the mountain where your guilt is sheltered;
and where in the wake of the scorched forest
race horsemen from your hollow cranium!
In the earth’s depths you hide your generous
victim! Speak to the opening door whose
doorknobs I clang with all the vengeance
of my sword’s blade! And, more, ay! Where to go?
Which of your soldiers will come following?
A faraway garden and at sunset
and onward toward the four winds!
I have no other choice there is no one
but infamous deserters who on foot
with corrupt weapons refill their coffers!
Not made of marble and not made of gold
not of hardened stone nor of hard iron
divinely magnificent humans
are made of something more common than that:
people today are mere cages of flesh
from the cruel airways toward mantles of gold
and purple refuge, and the internal
cage, black insect eyes and wide feverish
mouth, twists, eats and laughs! Death! my crime is good:
immortal earth your noble prisoner.