Collected Poems

OUR DAILY BREAD

Because it goes in this way, braiding its rolls of funeral crepe, and because it ties the quivering cat of Fear to the frozen nest, to the final fire. Now surrounded by light I am calm. And out on my Pacific a shipwrecked coffin mews. A DIVINE FALLING OF LEAVES (from the Spanish of Ce'sar Vallejo) Moon: royal crown of an enormous head, dropping leaves into yellow shadows as you go. Red crown of a Jesus who broods tragically, softly over emeralds! Moon: reckless heart in heaven, why do you row toward the west in that cup filled with blue wine, whose hull is defeated and sad? Moon: it is no use flying anyway, so you go up in a flame of scattered opals: maybe you are my heart, who is like a gypsy, •who loafs in the sky, shedding poems like tears! . . . OUR DAILY BREAD (from the Spanish of Ce'sar Vallejo) Breakfast is drunk down . . . Damp earth of the cemetery gives off the fragrance of the precious blood. City of winter . . . the mordant crusade IO2 (for Alejandro Gamboa) of a cart that seems to pull behind it an emotion of fasting that cannot get free! I wish I could beat on all the doors, and ask for somebody; and then look at the poor, and, while they -wept softly, give bits of fresh bread to them. And plunder the rich of their vineyards with those two blessed hands which blasted the nails with one blow of light, and flew away from the Cross! Eyelash of morning, you cannot lift yourselves! Give us our daily bread, Lord . . . ! Every bone in me belongs to others; and maybe I robbed them. I came to take something for myself that maybe was meant for some other man; and I start thinking that, if I had not been born, another poor man could have drunk this coffee. I feel like a dirty thief. . . Where will I end? And in this frigid hour, when the earth has the odor of human dust and is so sad, I wish I could beat on all the doors and beg pardon from someone, and make bits of fresh bread for him here, in the oven of my heart . . . ! SOME TRANSLATIONS 103 ...