POETRY

What are you but the vision of night?
Everything nocturnal is yours.

You invite us to the splendid feasts of dreams
and the just as splendid sleepless nights of reality.

You travel with men and women as if you were
the flame in their eyes, the staff of their happiness
or the thick smoke of their dawns.

For you, mother of pain, there are only glory and sorrow,
noon is not written in your diaries.

You, poetry, are nothing else
than the highest peak where madmen,
mortals,
those that luck and fortune disinherit,
find refuge.

You, who are hated, leprous, festering,
are the best of females,
the best mother,
the best wife,
the best sister
and the longest and most pleasurable night.

Traslated from Spanish by Rowena Hill