When shadow forms itself within you;
when you snuff out all your stars;
when you’re swimming in the mud, most fetid, most infected,
most miserable, most macabre, mostly made of mostly death,
most bestial, most arrested,
you have not fallen yet,
you have not rolled to the deepest depth, yet…
if in the cavern of your chest, most overlooked, most remote,
most secret, most arcane, darkest, emptiest,
meanest, and demoted
psalms of sadness there be sung,
biting down on anguish and heartache,
one part still pulses, moans an angel, chirps a nest of blushings,
and you feel a knot of anxiety.
Those who are born tenebrous;
those who are and will be larvae:
those who are hindrance, danger, contagion. Those who are Satan,
the damned, and those who never stopped short, never always,
never same, never never—
will not regenerate,
do not auscultate themselves in their nights,
do not weep for themselves…
they who present themselves commanding, satisfied—as rules,
as molds, as a stud to bolt things down, as standard unit of weight,
as load-bearing beam—
And they do not feel the desire,
for that which is healthy, for that which is pure
not one wretched moment, not one wretched instant,
in their arcane brain.
To him who “Tsks” his shadows,
to him who taciturn wanders;
to him who bears upon both his backs—like an unavoidable weight,
like the punishing weight of a hundred cities, for a hundred years;
of a hundred generations of delinquents—
his stubborn obfuscation;
to him who suffers night and day—
and through his sleep still suffers—
like the grace of a spiked belt, like a bone stuck in the throat,
like a nine-inch nail inside the brain, like a ringing in the ears,
like a relentless callus,
the notion of his own miseries,
the great burden of his passion:
to him I bow my head, I bend my knee;
I kiss the bottom of his feet; I say: God save you…
Dark Christ, stinking saint, Job within,
infamous cup of pain!

In the Guarani language
a young Paraguayan girl
a sweet lament rehearses,
singing, on her harp, like this,
in the Guarani language:

“Cry, cry, urutaú,
on the branches of the yatay;
Paraguay is no more,
where I was born, the same as you!
Cry, cry, urutaú!

In the sweet city of Lambaré,
happy, I lived in my cabin;
then comes war, and all its rage
leaves nothing standing
in the sweet city of Lambaré.

Father, mother, siblings, Ay!
All in the world, I have lost;
in my broken heart
only a savage sorrow;
mother, father, siblings, Ay!

Beside a green ubirapitá tree,
my love, who fought
heroically in the Timbó,
is now buried there,
beside a green ubirapitá tree.

Ripping my white tipoy skirt
I wear as sign of grief,
upon that holy ground
upon it, forever on my knees,
ripping my white tipoy skirt!

They killed him, the cambá people,
powerless to make him kneel;
he was the last to leave
from Curuzú and Humaitá;
they killed him, the cambá people.

Oh heavens, why did I not die
when, triumphant, my love embraced me,
returned from Curupaití?
Oh heavens, why, did I not die?

Cry, cry, urutaú,
on the branches of the yatay;
Paraguay is no more,
where I was born, the same as you!
Cry, cry, urutaú!”