English

 

 

 

REMEMBER THAT I WAS A GOOD MAN

 

Before the bells toll,

open

the doors, gently,

 

lest you wake the wolves

that guard my solitude.

 

Remember that

I was a good man

who harbored funerals in

his chest

and wrote bad poetry

when fortune

betrayed him

and withheld his tears.

 

We, the children of injustice,

walk with eyes sunk

by attempts to hold the gaze of sailors

as we called out SOS.

Had we only looked

at our own despair

listened to the songs—

just for a few minutes—

before the calamity,

the horizon would have opened wide

and hunger would have died

on our streets.

 

I once had another name

other than the one

you know,

a life

threatened by reproduction,

a dream

of living on dry land.

I stare at it

like a shepherd

gripping his only staff

in a narrow field,

its boundaries

a ruined body

reeking of smoke and fire.

 

Before they accuse me

of the crime of life

and start weaving

my biography,

remember that

I was a sacrifice,

a vagrant

 

on the humiliating curbs

of refuge,

waiting for someone

to offer me a kiss

and another homeland.

 

But believe them

if the funeral bells toll

and they say he was

a man with no identity

you'll know that

I was a good man.

 

 

BEFORE EVERYTHING SWITCHED

 

On a sunny day,
before everything turns:
the bicycle became a stretcher for the dead,
the ambulance a shaving salon,
the sidewalks coffins,
the sea a graveyard,
and faucet spouts ran dry,
and animal food became the food for the bourgeois.

Before God went into his eternal sleep,
and the houses lost their warm sounds,
and sleep its last night,
I had friends -
on a sunny day.

 

 

Translated by the author