Cesar Vallejo

   I tell myself: at last I have escaped the noise;

no one sees me on my way to the sacred nave.

Tall shadows attend,

and Darío who passes with lyre in mourning.

   With innumerable steps the gentle Muse emerges,

and my eyes go to her, like chicks to corn.

Ethereal tulles and sleeping titmice harass her,

while the blackbird of life dreams in her hand.

   My God, you are merciful, for you have bestowed this nave,

where these blue sorcerers perform their duties.

Darío of celestial Americas! They are so much

like you! And from your braids they make their hair shirts.

   Like souls seeking burials of absurd gold,

those wayward archpriests of the heart,

probe deeper, and appear … and addressing us from afar,

bewail the monotonous suicide of God!

     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!

   Children of the world,

if Spain falls — I mean, it’s just a thought —

if her forearm

falls downward from the sky seized,

in a halter, by two terrestrial plates;

children, what an age of concave temples!

how early in the sun what I was telling you!

how quickly in your chest the ancient noise!

How old your 2 in the notebook!

   Children of the world, mother

Spain is with her belly on her back;

our teacher is with her ferules,

she appears as mother and teacher,

cross and wood, because she gave you height,

vertigo and division and addition, children;

she is with herself, legal parents!

   If she falls — I mean, it’s just a thought — if Spain

falls, from the earth downward,

children, how you will stop growing!

how the year will punish the month!

how you will never have more than ten teeth,

how the diphthong will remain in downstroke, the gold star in tears!

How the little lamb will stay

tied by its leg to the great inkwell!

How you’ll descend the steps of the alphabet

to the letter in which pain was born!

   Children,

sons of fighters, meanwhile,

lower your voice, for right at this moment Spain is distributing

her energy among the animal kingdom,

little flowers, comets, and men.

Lower your voice, for she

shudders convulsively, not knowing

what to do, and she has in her hand

the talking skull, chattering away,

the skull, that one with the braid,

the skull, that one with life!

   Lower your voice, I tell you;

lower your voice, the song of the syllables, the wail

of matter and the faint murmur of the pyramids, and even

that of your temples which walk with two stones!

Lower your breath, and if

the forearm comes down,

if the ferules sound, if it is night,

if the sky fits between two terrestrial limbos,

if there is noise in the creaking of doors,

if I am late,

if you do not see anyone, if the blunt pencils

frighten you, if mother

Spain falls — I mean, it’s just a thought —

go out, children of the world, go look for her!…

When they turned off the lights, I felt like laughing. Things renewed their labors in the dark, at the point where they had been stopped; in a face, the eyes lowered to the nasal shells and took an inventory of certain missing optical powers, retrieving them one by one; a naval scale imperiously summoned the scales of a fish; three parallel raindrops halted at the height of a lintel, awaiting another drop that doesn’t know why it has been delayed; the policeman on the corner blew his nose noisily, emphasizing in particular his left nostril; the highest and the lowest steps of a spiral staircase began to make signs to each other that alluded to the last passerby to climb them. Things, in the dark, renewed their labors, animated by an uninhibited happiness, conducting themselves like people at a great ceremonial banquet, where the lights went out and all remained in the dark.

When they turned off the light, a better distribution of boundaries and frames was carried out around the world. Each rhythm was its own music; each needle of a scale moved as little as a destiny could move, that is to say, until nearly acquiring an absolute presence. In general, a delightful game was created between things, one of liberation and justice. I watched them and grew content, since in myself as well the grace of the numeral dark curvetted.

I don’t know who let there be light again. The world began to crouch once more in its shabby pelts: the yellow one of Sunday, the ashen one of Monday, the humid one of Tuesday, the judicious one of Wednesday, sharkskin for Thursday, a sad one for Friday, a tattered one for Saturday. Thus the world reappeared, quiet, sleeping, or pretending to sleep. A hair-raising spider with three broken legs emerged from Saturday’s sleeve.