BLESSED ARE THE POOR

You hail from the saltpeter section,
torn away from it by winds and knives,
flesh paintful with nettle and bite,
fallen like the fruit of sin.

Frightened shadows, obstructed
continually by the rising sun;
continually defeated and continually
afflicted by heaven-borne panics.

As you are born, you cry out; you seek in vain
the roots of your blood, the dark hollow,
moist and faithful from which the star emerged
that I fastened for you on the cindery air.

I observe you in silence, reflected
in the pale puddles that the rain
feeds in the neglected streets;
biting harshly on your names.

Hollow beings fed by bitter bread,
dirty rejects of the immense sea,
what memories support your rotting
foundations in the sand?

Are they dreams of rooms of marble and mirrors,
of pale roses and rime-frost music?
Or the golden mist of the dawn
stirring amid silk and emeralds?

It's hard to know if the air hurts you
when, with a tiger's voice, it roars louder and louder,
It's hard to know if your eyes
contain sulphur or fire—or only tears.

It's hard to touch with the fingertips
a heart full of fear or tenderness;
it's hard to know anything... because you are poor,
and the poor are a bottomless pit.

Why don't you understand that lean people exist
who make poetry and music, who weave
fantasies of gold for their children
and uninhabitable castles out of mist?

Why don't you understand the beauty of a dawn
made of electric light and violins,
and crisp as if starched, and with mosaics
guarded by stiff-necked duchesses?

Why don't you know how to clink fragile glasses
brimming over with wine and with rhetoric.
and the sharp savor of the fish
that come from the old Volga or the Blue Danube?

You only know how to say in your rough voices
that you are hungry or cold, and in the interludes
of a barbaric rhythm you swing and rock,
until you forget in sleep that you are men.

The only flower you know is the yelos
torn from the flesh; the only dawn,
the cruel and desolate remoteness
of the high firmament that punishes you.

You know no wine but blood,
no food but dry bread
gnawed and worried at, like a dog
beset by children with stones.

You live without Springtime in a damp
world dark with bluish mud;
your poor hearts in shreds
recoil silently from the snow.

You hail from the saltpeter regions,
from the bitterest climate,
of the purest, deepest silence
the silence of the unloved man.

You are like a thick rainfall, striking
the broken bronze of a great bell
suspended from the trees in the middle of
a brown and lonely field.

And so I try with my verses to crown you
with incongruous laurels
on this liturgical day in March
transparent as an immense affliction.

And I kiss the eyes of diamond,
the lips of ravaged earth;
and I offer myself to your hunger
like a loaf of bread miraculously multiplied.

Because you seek in vain the roots
of your dark death, I would like
to flood you with dawn or with blood,
or to plow your bare soil, like a star.

Because you came in the bitterest silence,
I cry out to heaven, «Oh blessed
are the poor, for they will possess the rose,
when the earth expires like a fading echo».