Villager
(For Spanish translation click here)

Distant vibration of small rusty bells

spills on the air

the rural fragrance of their anguish.

In the silent light

the setting sun bleeds its farewell.

Autumn’s amber on the landscape

takes on a cold hue of mournful gray!

To the gate of the house,

that time’s claws fill it with holes,

peeping in silence,

passing then to the nearby stable,

the calm silhouette

of an ox color of gold,

who yearns with its biblical eyes

listening the prayers of the cowbells

his virile bull age!

A noble rooster jumps across,

the garden wall,

flapping the pain of his song, and in sad alert,

as two drops of weep,

tremble his eyes in the dead afternoon!

At the old village

languidly plucks

the soft yaraví* of a guitar,

in whose eternity of deep suffering

the sad voice of an Indian tolls

like a huge old bell in a cemetery.

Leaning my elbows on the wall,

when dark hues triumph in the soul

and the wind prays in stiff branches

wooden flute laments, timid, uncertain,

I sigh my dismay,

to see that in the scarlet and gold penumbra

weeps a tragic blue of dead idylls!

*Yaraví is a melancholic song, originally from Quechua.