A mi hijo

You have refused to close your eyes, my dead one,

open before the sky like two swallows:

their colour, June-crowned, is now dew

as it leaves certain regions of the morning.

Today, which is a day dark as under the earth;

rainy, as under the earth, deserted,

with the sunless damp of my future body,

I want to have buried you, as under the earth.

Since you died, the mornings, wrenched by fire

from your sun-like eyes, bring no hope:

October hurled itself against our windows,

you gave way to Autumn and it turned the seas to night.

You have been devoured by the sun, your only, deep, rival,

and the remote darkness which threw you, aflame, into the world;

it pushes you, light shining downwards, carrying you to the depths,

swallowing you up; and it is as if you had never been born.

Ten months in the light, circling the sky,

a sun that is dead, turned into night, buried, eclipsed.

Without seeing daylight your hair has withered;

with dawn at its side, your flesh has turned to evening.

The bird asks after you, body to the east,

new-born flesh needing dawn and joy;

child that knew only how to laugh, and for so long,

that only certain flowers die with your smile.

Absent, absent, absent like the swallow,

summer bird that avoids living at the foot of the ice:

swallow which opens its fine feathers, and, soon after,

is shipwrecked on the enemy scissors of flight.

Flower that was not able to harden its teeth,

nor attain the slightest sign of bravery.

Life like a leaf with new-born lips,

a leaf which slips away when it starts to make a sound.

The advice of the sea has been of no use to you . . .

I have just stuck a dagger into a tender sun,

buried a piece of bread in oblivion,

thrown upon eyes a fistful of nothing.

Green, red, dark brown: green, blue and golden;

the hidden colours of life, the fields of fruit,

the wreath of flowers, destined for your feet,

of sad dark blacks, stiff solemn whites.

My poor love, you are cornered: look, it is now day.

(Oh, eyes without sunset, forever in daybreak!)

But in your belly, but in your eyes, my love,

night keeps falling, in desolation.