Elegía Para Una Muchacha Roja

(tenths, dedicated to Gladys Marín.)

Born in a town where the sun
Rains its honeyed dew,
Where trains from the tracks
Stain the sunset with smoke
And the orange is a lantern
That multiplies fruity light
And where the colossal bee
Trots through the air with passion
To stash in a drawer
Golden mysteries of glass.

Her childhood was a long winter:
Hunger and distances to erase
With school notebooks
And the wounds on her feet,
Wandering from time to time,
Further and further from home
Without a log to burn,
Without a hand to hold,
Without a light to defend
But a wound to close.*

Thus grew the comrade,
-rough flame in battle-,
Always beaten and offended
By a gust of wax,
The comrade.

The big city swallowed her
With so much laundry to do,
With so much wood to chop,
With so much gray necessity.
She did real work:
Served at the table of the lazy,
Sewed a blue suit in a century,
Went a day without stitching
And kept the time to dream
In the deepest part of the trunk.

Then the comrade saw
That there was a world to change;
That it was necessary to fight
In search of spring
And with wild hair
And with two torn hands
She blended into the surge
That shattered the foundations
Of the old discontented world,
To make the dawn clear.

Thus fought the comrade
-rough flame in battle-,
Always beaten and offended
By a gust of wax,
The comrade.

With a red hand she brought down
Stone by stone the wall,
It was endless like a net,
It was a flag that waved,
It was a lioness that attacked,**
It was sweet bed and it was a handkerchief,
It was a watchful eye in wakefulness,
It was an arm and a thunderous fighter,
Until a shot -simply-,
Covered her heart with ice.

Thus fell the comrade,
Decorated by her wound,
The most beautiful, the chosen one,
Under the skin of the flags,
The comrade.

* in the album