Some Days a Fruitful, Cautious Longing
Comes Over Me
(For Spanish translation click here)

Some days a fruitful, cautious longing comes over me,

to love and kiss affection on both cheeks,

and from afar there comes to me,

demonstrative, a wish, a different wish of loving, strong,

the one who hates me, the one who tears up his role, the little boy,

the one who weeps for one who has been weeping,

king of wine, slave of water

the one who hides in his own wrath

the one who sweats, the one who passes by, the one who

shakes himself within my soul.

The pleasure to arrange a braid of hair

of one who talks to me, the soldier’s hair;

one’s light, the great; one’s greatness to the boy.

I want to iron a handkerchief at one

for the one who cannot weep

and, when I’m sad or when good fortune pains me,

to patch up geniuses and children.

I want to help the good man be a little bad

and have an urge to sit

on the right of the left-handed, answer the dumb,

trying to be useful in what

I can, wanting very much

to wash the cripple’s foot,

and help my one-eyed neighbor sleep.

Oh, this love of mine, this world-wide love,

interhuman, parochial, fulfilled!

It comes just right,

from the foundations, from the public groin,

and coming from afar it makes one want to kiss

the singer’s scarf,

to kiss the one who suffers, in his roasting-pan,

the dumb, in his deaf cranial murmur, dauntless;

the one who gives me what I had forgotten in my breast,

on his Dante, on his Chaplin, on his shoulders.

To sum up, I should like,

when I am on the famous verge of violence,

or when my heart is brave, I should like

to help the one who smiles to laugh,

place a little bird square on the scruff of a villain’s neck,

nurse the sick by provoking them,

buy to kill from the killer—a dreadful thing—

and be at peace within myself

in everything.

6 November 1937