En ruta / Enrique Molina

En Route

How many days and how much shadow!
How many nights contaminated
By the memory of other nights
By the tattoo of other beaches!

There are wandering insomnia blocks
Huge serpents of laziness
Families invaded by weeds
Pale people who recede

How many black-winged trains
In the dementia of other skies!
How many fugitive plains
Like sand amidst your fingers!

There is sunrise with a bird
There is a burial with a priest
The letter no one reads
The hospice that escapes

Archaic mothers like a totem
Tending to a table of oblivion
Bread soaked by the waves
Unknown companions

And so many heads on fire
Captives of ancient history
Dazzling like the ocean
At the bottom of memory!

There is the wind with a feather
The lair without a caress
The summer’s golden sound
The breeze’s fresh wound

There is the hand made of stone and shade
That seeks the biggest roots
There is the man of dream and bone
With the moon of other countries

There is the one who turns his head
(Prisoner of the dead)
And the one who sees a woman from afar
When he glimpses the open door

And poor couples that love each other
On the astral weeds
Entwined beneath the shade
Under the shade of their arms

There are disappointed sand dunes
With black, sunken cities
Living basements that close up
Like enormous carnivorous flowers

And strange anxious meals
Of the Earth’s ardent hunger
Beautiful meals exalted
By the silence of stones

The savage farewell scream
Of the coast in the distance
A tortured lightning bolt
The splendor of ancient days

The mysterious burn
Of such light and such breath
With creatures who become absent
Masked by time

But I keep biting the leaves
Drinking wine and rain
Adoring that sun born
Of a woman disrobing

The sea returns a hero
Covered in flames and arrows
A blade burns and the chains
Of weeds fall apart

Lips like a river crossing
A body’s pure valleys
The raving of your hair
The nebulousness of your sex

(I belong to the tempest
I reclaim my species’ honor
The idolatry of my veins
My neglect amidst the current)




{ Enrique Molina | Argentina, 1910-1997 }