César Vallejo

for José Eulogio Garrido Like priestly imprisoned poets, the poplars of blood have fallen asleep. On the hills, the flocks of Bethlehem chew arias of grass at sunset. The ancient shepherd, who shivers at the last martyrdoms of light, in his Easter eyes has caught a purebred flock of stars. Formed in orphanhood, he goes down with rumors of burial to the praying field, and the sheep bells are seasoned with shadow. It survives, the blue warped in iron, and on it, pupils shrouded, a dog etches its pastoral howl.

I'm sitting here on the old patio beside your absence. It is a black well. We'd be playing, now. . . I can hear Mama yell "Boys! Calm down!" We'd laugh, and off I'd go to hide where you'd never look. . . under the stairs, in the hall, the attic. . . Then you'd do the same. Miguel, we were too good at that game. Everything would always end in tears. No one was laughing on that August night you went to hide away again, so late it was almost dawn. But now your brother's through with this hunting and hunting and never finding you. The shadows crowd him. Miguel, will you hurry and show yourself? Mama will only worry.

I will die in Paris with a rainstorm, on a day I already remember, I will die in Paris—and I don't shy away— perhaps on a Thursday, as today is, in autumn. It will be Thursday, because today, Thursday, as I prose these lines, I've put on my humeri in a bad mood, and, today like never before, I've turned back, with all of my road, to see myself alone. César Vallejo has died; they kept hitting him, everyone, even though he does nothing to them, they gave it to him hard with a club and hard also with a rope; witnesses are the Thursday days and the humerus bones, the solitude, the rain, the roads. . .