El donaire / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

Elegance

The dwarfs were forging tridents for the marine divinities. They were teaching the natives of the quarry islands the art of fishing for sponges. They invented obsidian mirrors.
     They occupied themselves with educating the nightingale and the kingfisher, the birds of happiness. They lived in plaster homes and only dared with the rabbits. They were exiled by a throng of caustic ants.
     Aristophanes was pleased to refer, amid Homeric guffaws, the submersion of the dwarfs in a swamp after their fierce resistance in a forest of irises and saffrons.
     The dwarfs would have emerged as victors without the animadversion of some cranes with incisive beaks, authors of incurable lesions.
     The dwarfs ran to save themselves in the ship of the Argonauts and confessed the origin of their misfortune. They had imitated in a cheerful manner the steps of Empuse, a crippled larva, with donkey legs.




El cielo de esmalte (1929)




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