Any word is not your word;
isn’t yours the child’s voice
with throat of thunder,
neither the colour of tulip nor the southerly breeze.
That shield does not save you from your fear,
your armour does not prevent the entrance of arrows.
Sometimes, the light is scattered
leaving a confusing hollow
in the men’s eye.
When forests in untold lands
didn’t imagine their foliage,
when the sun was a point
with all the points turned on,
when the stars were fragments
from a single, incomprehensible and crazy star,
and the atom vibrated in insistence,
the scribe was already part of a memory
in matter,
and though his eyes were not in spirit
nor bone, nor heat, nor weather,
in its inertia, life planned laughter of passion
and the darkroom of science.
Then, a man saw the chafing, the fissure,
the broken muscle for the simple dissolution
of frankness,
and moaned.

The spinning wheel

There is a logical claim
lost in the back of the wind,
a claim for space and science
in the infinite wisdom of the rocks.
As a crystalline nave,
time covers the beautiful nakedness of land,
and the ancestors’ sons paint themselves with colours
and dress with never seen mirrors.
And there are many other ways to flee.
There is a green weeping
caressing the calmness of the mountain,
From there comes the ore with his truth on his back.
Someone decomposed those seeds
and, believing himself wise, gave them a number,
and number and letter formed a strange parasite of paper
that does not quench our thirst of guests without gift.
The clearness rises from old philosophies still not written,
the stars know nothing of pigeons or creeds,
but the land has given flowers and insects,
and without counting us, wraps us, and we return to silence.
There are many other ways to flee.
Objects of great thinkers
with large brains and fortunes,
and prophets, magicians, monks and engineers.
Objects of useless footsteps, of invasions, of colonization,
of intrepid journeys around what or who,
of shapes and drawings, of forced changes,
and atomic rains that know nothing about core or atom.
Thus the land holding us is not thirst but is shelter,
However, the moaning rises in the desert
and the scream in the volcano.
Who will give me a clam and a bucket of sand?
Who will teach me how to know nothing?
And many other ways to flee.

In the most absurd manner,
mind plays to victory

I advance without knowing, groping,
forgetting that I think, that I breathe,
I omit the beginning and the reason for the dilemma.
Even when taking fate with temperance
obstacles arise, frequent friction,
with simple things, with such ease.
I fight to get voice,
for to plant jasmine flowers in the memory;
I do not mind the modesty,
I do not die by tumbling.
My desire knows no rest.
It is late when it warns that the feat
conspires, shakes up, fatigues,
tries to mute the light that shines
in the heat of a sincere food,
in the whisper of a child,
in front of the woman I love.
In the house, you dream with a chorus of joy,
with the brightness of the light that she lights,
with the children that rehearse juggling.
On the street, the ferocity never sings,
it revels in stalking, betrays,
and twirles the world.
There are no cardinal numbers in the cosmos,
so return is not defeat.
I leave the shield, I take off the harness,
I drink thirst and I shake the thunder of the night.
(inedit)

Burning ruminations
facing the nature of things

Against forgetfulness, time in me
claims his share, his revenge;
warns that I have forgotten the great destiny
in the hands of a fleeting smile
or in the gaps that history undresses
at every cycle.
Against forgetfulness — like the flowers say —,
every touch was a foreigner vibration.
Perhaps desires are only in the present
and they paint a future with dreams
or with a hug that will redeem.
But then come the voices and lamentation,
unsuspected corridors,
ashen infamy.
Perhaps the cries are part of those dreams,
of that vibration that cannot be stopped.
In the wind of time, air, earth,
trees and rivers, all nature
weaves laws that numb piety,
all nature reject the forgiveness of the weak,
that sow the verbs of punishment,
that seek the fight.
Now, my hands deny the fencing,
condemn the weight of the sword
to a distant memory in space
and they do not want to think of the epic.
The loud story undresses
and who I was when I was not
wanted to win the battle of the righteous,
fighting the burning flames,
shine a light on the rationale,
Meanwhile, fate laughed like today,
with his eternal drunkenness.

Translated by author