Engomi
The plain was wide and levelled;
from afar you could seethe motion of arms digging.
In the sky the clouds with many contours, here and there
a gold and rosy trumpet; the sunset.
In the thin grass and the thorns some light
after the rain breaths stirred; it must have rained
over there on the mountain tops that took some color.
And I walked closer to the ones working,
women and men with spades in ditches.
It was an ancient city; walls roads and houses
stood up like the petrified muscles of Cyclops,
the anatomy of spent strength under the eye
of the archeologist the anesthetist or the surgeon.
Ghosts and fabrics, luxury and lips, sunken
and the partitions of pain spread wide open
revealing, naked and indifferent, the tomb.
And I glanced up toward the men at work
the stretched shoulders and the arms that struck
with a heavy and fast rhythm this dead silence
as though the wheel of destiny passed through the ruins.
Suddenly I was walking and not walking
I looked at the flying birds, and they were frozen
I looked at the air of the sky, and it was fogged up
I looked at the bodies that fought, and they were still
and among them a face climbing up the light.
The black hair rolled on the neck, the eyebrows
moved like the swallow’s wings, the nostrils gracefully over the lips,
and the body appeared from the fighting arms naked
with the unripe breasts of the Virgin a motionless dance.
And I lowered my eyes all around;
girls kneaded, without touching the dough
women spun, without touching the spindles
lambs were drinking, and their tongues still
over the green waters that looked asleep
and the ploughman stayed with his goad in the air.
And I looked again at that body ascending
a lot of people had gathered, like ants
and they struck her with spears but didn’t injure her.
Now her belly shone like the moon
and I thought that the sky was the womb
that gave birth to her and took her away again, mother and child.
Her feet were still visible as though petrified
then they vanished; an Assumption. The world
turned again as it was, ours
in its time and in the earth. Aromas of bulrush
started stirring the ancient slopes of memory
breasts among the leaves, moist lips;
and they all turned dry at once in the openness of the plain
in the stone’s despair, in the spent strength
in this empty space with the thin grass and the thorns
where a snake crawled carefree,
where they take a long time to die.
Libros Libertad 