We present this work in honor of Dia de la Memoria.

 

Hummingbirds buzz
in the morning’s red branch. Wonder of wonders!

Today, young gravedigger, I buried
a hundred days and nights like dead birds.
I yank this yoke of hours from my shoulders.
And today, unfleeing heart, my hand destroys a hundred dawns
withered as herbs pressed in your daybook.

An inscription scatters
on the tomb of time.

This morning strands of road
whip-cracked under my drunken heels.
I come from night: like two green fruits
my eyes dangle over the world.

Bell-ringer of distances: underfoot
a path, faded away and avoided, sprouts
like a fugue tree.
And taut as a slingshot, it shoots
pebbles from sleep into the fragile air.

Today the first morning of the world
has risen between two nights.
Who woke that lark, time harvested,
that slept on your dry branch?

Oh, heart, red bobbin
undone in the dripping day’s palm:
a door, as yet unopened, creaked!
And a king happier than the word sun
fills our shoes with blue coins.

Happiness!
A girl drinks up all the sky in the well.
Her wind apron unclad her…

A spider-thrush appeared and tangled the whole hill
in the threads of its songs.

There, where the iron stirrups are kept,
Life! sang the reed-colored men…

My happiness escapes
and trembles the light’s fresh branch.

Bare-heeled boy riding the flank of morning,
my happiness, that digger of silence, will shake
the tree that sprouts the most birds.

Ah, it is taller, the air’s dome,
and it coins our voices, free-timbred, unique.
My nerve-tree is end-rooted in morning.

I am the test of the unfledged world.
My hands, fused to rudders of sun,
guide this day under tender skies.
My steps tie this net of roads.

Hand of the sling-shooting god,
you were tossed like the nimblest stone from his sling.
Long scream in the bracketed silence;
companion of the curving night’s road, that is how you rise.

Wordless friend,
let your voice unravel the oldest face.

My hands, hollowed by the rudders of sun,
guide this day through the wind.
I arrived from morning: like two green fruits
my eyes dangle over the world.

I have seen distance on its knees
like a god to whom no one brings gifts,
and death, gentler than a llama skin,
molds itself to the shape of our dreams…

Hunter of happiness:
I tie a hundred bleeding birds to my waist.