Poem of the Week

     My father can hardly,
in the bird-borne morning, get
his seventy-eight years, his seventy-eight
winter branches, out into the sunlight.
The Santiago graveyard, anointed
with Happy New Year, is in view.
How many times his footsteps have cut over toward it,
then returned from some humble burial.

     Today it’s a long time since my father went out!
A hubbub of kids breaks up.

     Other times he would talk to my mother
about city life, politics;
today, supported by his distinguished cane
(which sounded better during his years in office),
my father is unknown, frail,
my father is a vesper.
He carries, brings, absentmindedly, relics, things,
memories, suggestions.
The placid morning accompanies him
with its white Sister of Charity wings.

     This is an eternal day, an ingenuous, childlike,
choral, prayerful day;
time is crowned with doves
and the future is filled with
caravans of immortal roses.
Father, yet everything is still awakening;
it is January that sings, it is your love

that keeps resonating in Eternity.
You will laugh with your little ones,
and there will be a triumphant racket in the Void.

     It will still be New Year. There will be empanadas;
and I will be hungry, when Mass is rung
in the pious bell tower by
the kind melic blind man with whom
my fresh schoolboy syllables, my rotund
innocence, chatted.
And when the morning full of grace,
from its breasts of time,
which are two renunciations, two advances of love
which stretch out and plead for infinity, eternal life,
sings, and lets fly plural Words,
tatters of your being,
at the edge of its white
Sister of Charity wings, oh! my father!