"To a cat" by Jorge Luis Borges

No mirrors are quieter
no more furtive the adventurous dawn;
you are, in the moonlight, that panther
who is given to us spotted from afar.
By an indecipherable work of a divine
decree, we seek you in vain;
more remote than the Ganges and West,
yours is the solitude, yours the secret.
Your haunch allows the lingering
caress of my hand. You have accepted,
from eternity that is already forgotten,
the love of the apprehensive hand.
You are in another time. You are the owner
of a closed ambience like a dream.

"Coveted, prohibited" by Jaime Sabines

Coveted, prohibited
close to me, one step away, sorceress.
Offering yourself with your eyes to those who pass,
looking at you, mature, overflowing,
asking for your body to be their tomb.
malignant young, virgin
ignited, closed
I'm watching and loving you,
Your blood in turmoil,
your head spinning and climbing,
your horizontal body on grapes and smoke.
You're perfect, desired.
I love you and your mother when you are together.
She is still beautiful and has
what you do not know.
I can't decide who I prefer
when she fixes your dress
and let you go in search for love.

"Art" by Julián del Casal

When life, as immense burden,
Weighs about the tired spirit
And before the last God drifts burned
The latter grain of fragrant incense;

When we taste, with intense eagerness,
From all bitter poisoned fruit
And boredom, with masked face,
Confronts us on the vast road;

The great soul, lonely and pure
Despised by the petty reality,
Finds in art ignored bliss,

As the halcyon, in cold obscure night,
Seeking asylum in the mossy rock
Inundating the blue sea of silver waves.

"Pupa" by José Asunción Silva

When the girl, still sick
went out one morning
and walked with hesitating steps
the neighboring mountain,
she brought between a bouquet of wild flowers
hidden a chrysalis,
placed in her room, close to
the little white bed...
.................................................................
A few days later, at the moment
when she expired,
and everybody saw her, with their eyes
clouded by tears,
at the time of her death, we felt
the faint sound of wings
and we saw escape, flying away through
the old window
opening onto the garden, a small
golden butterfly...
.................................................................
I looked for the insect's prison,
now empty, with a quick view;
As I saw it, I watched the dead girl's
withered and pale forehead,
and I thought if upon leaving her sad jail
the winged butterfly,
would find light and immense space,
the campestral emanations,
as they leave the prison that holds them
what would their souls find?

"Oblivion" by Idea Vilariño 

When a soft mouth sleeping mouth kisses
as dying then,
sometimes when it reaches beyond the lips
and the eyelids fall full of desire
quietly consenting like the air,
the skin with its silky warmth asks for nights
and the kissed mouth
in its ineffable pleasure asks for nights, too.

Ah, silent nights, of soft dark moons,
long nights, sumptuous, crossed by pigeons
in an air made out of hands, love, given tenderness,
nights like ships...

It is then, in high passion, when the one who kisses
knows ah, too much, without respite, and sees that now
the world becomes a distant miracle
opening deep summers on lips,
abdicated by his conscience,
that he is finally forgotten in a kiss
and a passionate wind undresses his temples,
it is then, kissing, that eyelids descend,
and the air shudders with a hint of life,
and what is not air
also quivers, the ardent beam of the hair,
the velvet of the voice now, and, sometimes,
the illusion populated by suspended deaths.

"Shadow" by Ricardo Jaimes Freyre 

Oh, how cold is your hand! You laugh?? Why are you laughing?
Your teeth collide. There's something strange in your eyes. Your looks
cut like daggers. It hurts your laughter,
I dread the cold of your stark hand:

Let me escape! The painful night has us already surrounded
with the fright of its shadows ... There is an abyss at my feet.
There is a clamor at the bottom of the abyss. Darkness
gathers on the flanks of the mountain cleft.

Oh, this is not your hand! Why does the cold of this hand
penetrates me right to my bones? Why does a scythe
shines over my forehead ...? Can't you hear that vague beat,
coming smooth and soft, like the echo of distant music?
Oh, how sad is that rhythm that sighs in my ears
and leads my eyes to the bitterness of my tears!
Oh, how sad is that rhythm! Let me mourn. Oh, let me
kneel! Maybe my lips know a prayer.

I am cold. I am afraid. Those shadows moving
are ghosts intertwining at the brink...
Do not drag me... I'm frightened... I fear the abyss.
Let me flee... The flesh is already separating from my bones...

Oh, that spectrum comes towards me with outstretched arms,
absorbing with his eyes my scorched pupils!
My hands are stiff now, my eyes are dry
and the wail of the chasm calls, cold and dreary.
Lets go then. Can you see how the chain of ghosts
pushes detached links to the bottom of the top?
Come on now. Take me. I feel the beat of my veins
adjust to the rhythm of the distant music;
sweet and sad rhythm, swaying in the darkness
harmonizing with my weights the caress of his wings,
like a skiff
swinging in
the waves.
Gently ... Slowly
by the soft
fugitives
movement
going extinct
on the beach.
undulating in the dark,
the ghosts chain in its obscure dance...
Lets enter now the depths of night and horror ...
Oh, the love! Oh, the happiness! Oh, the joy!

Oh, the hope!

"This is my love" by Jorge Debravo

This is my love, brothers, this effort
dense, mature, tall,
these fingers agonizing and this
bunch of enthusiasm.

I love you not asleep:
I love you fighting and working,
making deicides axes,
freeing.

I love what is revealed in you from gods
before fear and whip,
what sweats, living and guerrilla
at the bottom of the american bone
Being love, not more than flesh,
fighting, not more than a step,
fire, only a cry,
human, not more than tree. 


*Note: "american" refers to a sentiment of brotherhood between all spanish speaking people in latin america.

"Daughters of the Wind" by Alejandra Pizarnik

They have come.
Invading the blood.
Smelling of feathers,
of needs,
of crying.
But you feed the fear
and the loneliness
as if they were two small animals
lost in the wilderness.

They have come
to burn down the age of the dream.
A farewell is your life.
But you embrace yourself
like the snake mad of motion
only finding itself
because nobody is there.

You weep beneath your tears,
opening the coffer of your desires
and you are richer than the night.

But it feels so lonely
words commit suicide.

"Drops of dust" by Dina Posada

 

deleted doors
slippery dates
liquid city
emptying into my void

impossible walls
covered
by shady vines

I pull the scab of the years
and reach my father
-closed landscape
book I never understood-
and my mother
-stubborn survivor of tenderness

in words
I populate a station
to abreviate the distance without exit

"My Love" by Eugenio Montejo

My love moves in another body on this street
I feel its footsteps under the rain,
walking, dreaming, as in me long ago...
There are echoes of my voice in its whispers,
I can recognize them.
It has the age once was mine,
a lamp that lights up on our encounter.
My love embellished with the sea of hours,
my love on the terrace of a cafe
with a white hibiscus in its hands,
dressed in the fashion of the new millennium.
My love will continue when I'm gone,
with another laughter and with other eyes,
like a flame that leaped between two candles
and stayed lighting up the blue of the soil.

"I perceive the secret..." by Nezahualcóyotl

I perceive what is secret, what is hidden:
Oh you gentlemen!
So we are, we mortals,
Four by four, men,
We will have to leave,
We will have to die on earth...

No one will become jade,
Nor gold:
We'll be preserved as dust
We all will have to go
There, in the same way.
No one will remain,
Perishing together,
We will go, like that, to his home.

As a painting
We will be erased.
As a flower,
We will dry out
Here on earth.
Like the plumage vesture of the zacuán bird,
From being the beautiful rubber necked bird,
We will fade away
We'll go to his home.

Sadness came along
Turning those who live inside her
Into spins...
Meditate, gentlemen,
Eagles and Tigers,
Even if you were made of jade,
Even if you go beyond,
to the place of the fleshless...
We will have to disappear
No one will stay.

"Farewell" by Gabriel Zelaya

Maybe, when I die,
they will say, he was a poet.
And the world, always beautiful, will shine without awareness.

Maybe you won't remember
who I was, but these anonymous verses I budded
one day will echo in you

Perhaps there will be nothing left
of me, not a word,
nor one of these words I dream today in the morning.

But seen or unseen,
but said or unsaid,
I will be in your shadow, you beautifully alive ones oh!

I will keep following,
I will continue dying,
I will be, not really knowing how, part of this great concert.

"Chronicle of an ordinary pedestrian" by Harold Alva Viale

He lit the night

The route of turned off pedestrians between traffic

Shaken like a reflection multiplied in smell

The fury of an arrow stopped on his tongue

There is nobody

Only the shadow of his nightmares

Only the sadness of all that he appoints

As a high relief of terror

At the door of his palms

The certainty of death

Its skeleton

Approaching as the shot of God

Approaching like a spittle

On the walls of his own skull

The loneliness of showcases

The rancor of history

On the grim runway of his paces

Your street in his pupils

Your fear

There is nobody

Only this city

Only the cables connected like veins

In the fauces of anonymous suiciders

His breath on windows

His eyelids consumed by this surface

Of beings that do not assimilate

The sword in the throat

The tusk in the throat

The bullet in the throat.