POETRY IS FICTION (AND A HORN)

 

I don't consider myself a particularly tormented person.

But sometimes resignation gets the best of me.

What are we going to do, everything changes.

An old classmate is about to marry a Catholic fanatic;

another one has been at sea for nine months

fishing illegally;

nine months, an entire pregnancy,

maybe he became a person in the womb of the sea,

because he sure didn't in his mother's.

Sometimes a tremendous resignation gets the best of me

because when your solitude colides with mine

it hurts.

This feeling is, how shall I say it,

like realizing that when we turn twenty-one

the girls who were nine years old when we were thirteen

are now seventeen.

Realizing at the end of the night, violently and suddenly,

that that guilt-ridden dawn and those tender breasts

we never would have guessed could turn out to be so

will never be our own.

I don't know if it makes much sense when I explain it like this.

We realize this and that,

that we've already gulped down the last cups of our naivete.

That we lose our greatest happiness due to the smallest errors:

That's why the tiniest errors are the most painful.

The big errors aren't so bad.

We can cuddle up and live inside them

or wander around them.

What can you do, however,

with an error no larger than a bug's wing?

Laughter is the only therapy

in the face of things that have worried us.

Yet not even that is enough.

Just like it is not enough to cover mirrors with sheets

in order to become invisible. That, above all.

And that everything we've lost in life we lost

because we didn't execute on time,

not for a long time, an adage, a greeting,

or a gesture of kindness.

 

  © Harkaitz Cano
   © itzulpenarena: Justin Crumbaugh


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