In honor of El Cinco de Mayo, we present this work by a master Mexican poet and statesman.

 

I have a sovereign at home,
the only one whom my soul venerates;
His gray hair is his crown,
honor is his law and virtue is his guide.

In slow hours of misery and mourning,
full of firm and manly constancy,
keep the faith with which he spoke to me about heaven
in the first hours of my childhood.

The bitter ban and sadness
They opened an incurable wound in his soul;
He is an old man, and he carries in his head
the dust of the path of life.

See the fierce storms of the world,
of luck the unfortunate hours,
and passes, like Christ the Tiberias,
standing on the curled waves.

Dry their tears, silence their pains,
and only on duty his eyes fixed,
collects thorns and spreads flowers
on the path he laid out for his children.

He told me: “To him who is good, bitterness
He never wets his cheeks with tears:
in the world the flower of fortune
At the slightest breath it falls off.

“Do good without fear of sacrifice,
The man must fight serene and strong,
and find who hates evil and vice
a bed of roses in death.

“If you are poor, be content and be good;
If you are rich, protect the unfortunate,
and the same in your home as in someone else’s
Save your honor to live honestly.

“Love freedom, free is man
and its most severe judge is conscience;
as much as your honor guards your name,
for my name and my honor form your inheritance.”

This august code, in my soul could
Since I heard it, it has been recorded;
In all the storms he was my shield,
He has saved me from all the storms.

My father has in his serene gaze
faithful reflection of your honest conscience;
so much loving and good advice
I surprise you in the brilliance of your gaze!

The nobility of the soul is its nobility;
the glory of duty forms his glory;
He is poor, but he contains his poverty
the biggest page in its history.

Being the worship of my soul your affection,
As luck would have it, by honoring his name,
was the love that inspired me as a child
the most sacred inspiration of man.

May heaven grant that the song that inspires me
His eyes always see him with love,
and of all the verses of my lyre
These are the ones worthy of his name.

We present this work in honor of the poet’s 110th birthday.

 

Water hollows stone,
wind scatters water,
stone stops the wind.
Water, wind, stone.

Wind carves stone,
stone’s a cup of water,
water escapes and is wind.
Stone, wind, water.

Wind sings in its whirling,
water murmurs going by,
unmoving stone keeps still.
Wind, water, stone.

Each is another and no other:
crossing and vanishing
through their empty names:
water, stone, wind.

Translation by Eliot Weinberger

We present this work in honor of the Mexican holiday, Constitution Day.

 

Plunged into the silence of the grave,
Were found the Mexican people:
Fatal silence interrupted only
By the chains they dragged.

The last groan of the unhappy slave
Was punished as if it had been an atrocious crime,
Or it resounded in the ears of the
Oppressors as if it were triumphal music.

Hidalgo cried at last with voice divine:
“Freedom to Mexico, and forever!”
And hurled war at the Spanish tyrant.

Eleven years the mortal conflict lasted;
The throne crumbled, and in its ruins
Floats the standard of liberty.

Translation by Ernest S. Green and H. Von Lowenfels

We present this work in honor of the 150th anniversary of the poet’s death.

 

Without tears, without complaints,
without farewells, without a sob!
We carried on until the last… fortune
brought us here with the same objective,
we both came to bury the soul
beneath the tomb of scepticism.

Without tears…tears have no power
to bring a cadaver back to life;
our flowers fall and they turn
but at least in the turning, they leave
us with dry sight and a firm conscience.

Now you see it! for your soul and mine
spaces and the world are deserts…
we have concluded both,
covered with sadness and affliction,
we’re not at the end, we’re just two corpses
in search of the shroud of forgetting.

Children and dreamers when we
barely left the cradle,
pain, still alien to our lives
slipping along sweet and serene
like a swan’s wing in a lagoon;
when the dawn of the first caress
hasn’t yet peeked beneath the veil
that the virginal ignorance of the child
extends between his eyelids and the sky
your soul like mine,
in its clock advancing the hour
and in their darknesses lighting the day,
they saw a panorama that opened
beneath a kiss and at that dawn’s light;
and feeling, upon seeing that countryside
the wings of a supreme force,
we opened them early, and early
they brought us to the end of the voyage.

We gave to earth
the tints of love, and of the rose;
to our garden nests and songs
to our heaven birds and stars;
we used up the flowers on the road
to fashion from them
a crown for the angel of destiny…
and today in the midst of sad discord
of such an agonized or dead flower
one lifts only the pale and deserted
bloom that is poisoned by memory.

From the book of life
what we write today is the last page…
Let’s close it at once
and in the sepulchre of lost faith
we will also bury our anguish.

And since heaven now concedes that
these evils are our last
so the soul can prepare to rest,
although the final tear cost us
we saw the task through to the end.
And afterward, when the angel of forgetting
has delivered these ashes
that guard the painful memory
of so many illusions smashed to bits
and of so much vanished pleasure,
we’ll leave these spaces and return
to the tranquil life of earth,
now that the night of early pain
advances toward and encloses us
in the sweet horizons of tomorrow.

Let’s leave these spaces or if you
want to, we can try out our breath,
a new journey to that blessed region
whose only memory resuscitates
the cadaver of the soul, upon feeling.
Let’s throw ourselves off this world then,
where everything is shadow and void,
we’ll make a moon from memory
if the sun of our love has grown cold;
we’ll fly if you like,
to the depths of those magic regions
and pretending hopes and illusions
we’ll smash the tomb and rising
on our bold and powerful flight,
we will form a heaven between shadows
and we will be the owners of that heaven.

Translation by Elaine Stirling

We present this work in honor of the poet’s 100th birthday.

 

Because I was alone
I want to think of you as alone.
That you didn’t go, that you slept.
That you left me without leaving,
and that you needed me
to be able to be happy.

Anyway, I’ve recovered
my place in the world: you came back,
you became reachable

You give me back the time,
the pain, the ways, happiness,
the voice, the body, the soul,
life, and death, and what lives
beyond death.

You give me back everything
locked up in the appearance
of a woman, your self, the one I love.

You came back little by little, you woke
and weren’t surprised
to find me beside you.

And I could almost see the last step
of the secret you climbed
while sleeping, as you opened
—slowly, quietly—your eyes
inside my eyes that kept
the deathwatch over you.

Translation by Marlon L. Fick

We present this work in honor of the poet’s 105th birthday.

 

Outside space and time the deer wander, at once swift and languid, and no one knows whether their true place is in immobility or in movement; they combine the two in such a way that we are forced to place them in eternity.

Inert or dynamic, they keep changing the natural horizon, and they perfect our ideas of time, space, and the laws of moving bodies. Made expressly to solve the ancient paradox, they are at once Achilles and the tortoise, the bow and the arrow. They run without ever overtaking. They stop and something remains always outside them, galloping.

The deer cannot stand still, but moves forward like an apparition, whether it be among real trees or out of a grove in a legend: Saint Hubert’s stag bearing a cross between his antlers, or the doe that gives suck to Genevieve de Brabant. Wherever they are encountered, the male and the female compose the same fabulous pair.

Quarry without peer, all of us mean to take it, even if only with the eyes. And if Jan de Yespes tells us that what he pursued, when hunting, was so high, so high-he is not referring to the earthly dove, but to the deer: profound, unattainable, and in flight.

Translation by W.S. Merwin

We present this work in honor of the poet’s 105th birthday.

 

Think of your look and my oblivion
leaving the thought dilated
through your eyes, drowned
of his own living with your meaning;

then look at your oblivion that appears in me
Like a rose that gave space
slight prolongation and then out
the light itself that touches with its aroma,

is to give myself to you without further ado
that the fight of the body against the wind,
and with you dreaming of being so quiet

like a shipwrecked sea or vain attempt:
because since I can’t think of you,
I leave my thought forgotten in you.

We present this work in honor of the poet’s 165th birthday.

 

Look at the landscape: vastness down below,
vastness on vastness in the sky. Between,
sapped at their footing by the wild ravine,
the high sierras rise, a distant show.

Look, where the grim half-burnt savannah broods:
gigantic block upon gigantic block,
torn by the earthquake from the living rock.
Never a track and never a path intrudes.

Adesolate and burning atmosphere,
studded with eagles, high, ethereal,
like nails on which unhurried hammers fall.

Tremendous darkness, and tremendous fear
and silence, interrupted if at all
by the triumphal gallop of the deer.

Translation by Timothy Ades