La nave de las almas / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

Ship of Souls

I barely recall the place of my absence. A column of fire was illuminating the boreal clime. I had become lost in a desert of snow.
     The voice of my distress was rising to the clouds of pale amber.
     Your ghost came from the distance, in the taciturn ship, guided by the flight of a wounded albatross. Your actual life had slid, centuries before, in a graceful city. Shakespeare has dreamed the chimerical gardens, where the gentlemen and ladies of importance persist in winning the honor of acuteness or decant the merits of love with citations and arguments from Plato. Cypresses and laurels demand the virginal sky.
     I had conceived around your image an inhuman legend and pointed to your passage from this world in the nocturnal darkness. I furtively deposited some violets on your casket, those flowers with your very name.
     You took me, as a reward for my fidelity, to the vague country of your home, to a horizon of reverie. I attended the somnambulist parade of your sisters, heroines of the tragedy, and fell face down at the sight of pain, under a vengeful bird’s flapping wings, condemned to the fate of Satan.




El cielo de esmalte (1929)




{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }