Selected Writings of César Vallejo. César Vallejo
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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]
________________
AGAPE
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]
________________
THE VOICE IN THE MIRROR
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]
________________
OUR BREAD
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]
________________
THE MISERABLE SUPPER
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