Selected Writings of César Vallejo. César Vallejo

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Selected Writings of César Vallejo - César Vallejo Wesleyan Poetry Series

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her taste of homemade May rum.

      She must be at the door watching some cloudscape,

      and at length she’ll say, trembling: “Jesus … it’s so cold!”

      And on the roof tiles a wild bird will cry.

      [CE]

      ________________

      Today no one has come to inquire;

      nor have they asked me for anything this afternoon.

      I have not seen a single cemetery flower

      in such a happy procession of lights.

      Forgive me, Lord: how little I have died!

      On this afternoon everybody, everybody passes by

      without inquiring or asking me for anything.

      And I do not know what they forget and feels

      wrong in my hands, like something that is not mine.

      I have gone to the door,

      and feel like shouting at everybody:

      If you are missing something, here it is!

      Because in all the afternoons of this life,

      I do not know what doors they slam in a face,

      and my soul is seized by someone else’s thing.

      Today no one has come;

      and today I have died so little this afternoon!

      [CE]

      ________________

      So life goes, like a bizarre mirage.

      The blue rose that sheds light, giving the thistle its being!

      Together with the dogma of the murderous

      burden, the sophism of Good and Reason!

      What the hand grazed, by chance, has been grasped;

      perfumes drifted, and among them the scent of

      mold that halfway down the path has grown

      on the withered apple tree of dead Illusion.

      

      So life goes,

      with the treacherous canticles of a shriveled bacchante.

      Completely rattled, I push onward … onward,

      growling my funeral march.

      Walking at the feet of royal Brahacmanic22 elephants

      and to the sordid buzzing of a mercurial boiling,

      couples raise toasts sculpted in rock,

      and forgotten twilights a cross to their lips.

      So life goes, a vast orchestra of Sphinxes

      belching out its funeral march into the Void.

      [CE]

      ________________

       For Alejandro Gamboa

      One drinks one’s breakfast … The damp graveyard

      earth smells of beloved blood.

      City of winter … Mordant crusade

      of a cart that seems to drag along

      a feeling of fasting in chains!

      One wants to knock on each door

      and ask for who knows who; and then

      see to the poor, and, crying softly,

      give morsels of bread to everybody.

      And to strip the rich of their vineyards

      with the two saintly hands

      that with a blast of light

      flew off unnailed from the Cross!

      Matinal eyelash, don’t raise up!

      Our daily bread—give it to us,

      Lord …!

      All my bones belong to others;

      maybe I stole them!

      I took for my own what was perhaps

      meant for another;

      and I think that, had I not been born,

      another poor man would be drinking this coffee!

      I’m a lousy thief … Where will I go?

      And in this cold hour, when the earth

      smells of human dust and is so sad,

      I want to knock on every door

      and beg who knows who, forgive me,

      and bake him morsels of fresh bread

      here, in the oven of my heart …!

      [CE]

      ________________

      How long will we have to wait for what is

      not owed to us … And in what corner will

      we kick our poor sponge23 forever! How long before

      the cross that inspires us does not rest its oars.

      How long before Doubt toasts our nobility for

      having suffered …

      We have already sat so

      long at this table, with the bitterness of a child

      who at midnight, cries from hunger, wide awake …

      And when will we join all the others, at the brink

      of an eternal morning, everybody breakfasted.

      For

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