After the Rain II
The young shepherd boy was waiting for us there, to
teach us how to play the flute.
And whatever we touched after that — a cup, a book,
the back of a chair
was as if we were trying our fingers on the flute.
Shall we go for a short walk around the neighborhood
then?
Perhaps we’ll find some wild flowers that have poked
through schisms amid the rocks.
The whole of Athens is visible down there — the trolleys
go around like big ants — a man who pushes his cart is
like an ant that pushes its grain of wheat —
the silence of sundown and its reflection on the windows
of the cars
as if they adorn the rough forest with sparkles. You can smell
emigration and wild celery.
The gypsies must have lifted their tents on their shoulders
they must have wrapped the distances and their songs
in their huge square kerchiefs made of canvas.
Only a knot remains on top of the clouds and in our throats
like the knot the gypsies used to tie their bundled cloths.
They took their bundles on their shoulders and vanished in
the steam of the dusk
like the army Red Cross regiment in the forest.
Now the last two birds drink rain water from the half
part of the broken violin.
The barefoot angels are cold. Everything passes.
You hear the train’s whistle as if coming from the underworld.
Athens after the rain.
No, I say to you. I don’t want. They killed them over there.
They were young.
They hadn’t finished their first song. How bitter is the evening.
The evening star is red against the gray sky
of the neighbourhood
like the bloodied hole in the shirt of the killed man.
Strange, really, how fast children grow these days;
when you say I’m hungry and they tell you there’s
no bread— you grow twenty years between these
two words.
Their voices are heard coming from the playground;
adult voices, strong, like the pain in the stomach
like the train loaded with ammunition and going
through a tunnel.
Sometimes their ball is seen over the red, washed roofs
of the houses
sketching a curve as if designing a bridge that connects
the two edges of the city — passing over that bridge
you could reach the sky. Lightning hides behind
the hills, a proclamation in the pockets of the children.
And the evening star is their ball. How high it has reached.
Libros Libertad 