Beautiful Flowers and White, as it was Suitable
He entered the café where they used to go together.
it was here that his friend told him three months ago,
“We don’t have any money. We are two poor
boys, reduced to drinking at cheap taverns.
I tell you honestly that I can not go
with you any longer. Someone else, you must know, wants me.”
Someone else had promised him two suits and some
silk handkerchiefs. To win his friend back,
he moved earth and sky and found twenty pounds.
His friend went back to him for the twenty pounds.
and also, along with these, for the old intimacy,
for their old love, their deep feeling.
The “other” was a liar, a real asshole.
He had made just one suit of clothes for his friend,
and that under pressure, and after a thousand pleas.
But now he no longer wants the suits,
he doesn’t want the silk handkerchiefs at all,
not even the twenty pounds, or even twenty piastres.
On Sunday, at ten o’clock in the morning, they buried him.
On Sunday, they buried him: it’s been almost a week.
On his cheap coffin, he placed flowers,
beautiful flowers and white as it was suitable,
for his beauty and his twenty-two years.
When he went out in the evening, he had found some work,
needing to earn his bread at the café where
they used to go together: it was like a knife in his heart
that smoky café where they used to go together.
Libros Libertad 