In the country of pain there is the whimper of degradation,
and the man on the tall horse looks down on the defeated.
And the sir who has no imagination cannot suffer sorrow
since the land around him is a dazzle of mirrors.
He who sharpens his knife at the breakfast table and does not hear
the cry
of the deprived and insulted dies the death of eternity,
and he who sings in the bathroom while the child drowns
will choke on the suffocating garbage of his own soul.
Listen, can you not hear it, the hum of Pain is everywhere
it whines over the tilled fields like the wires of telegraph poles,
and he who cannot see the dead for the flutter of silken flags
lies in a coffin of his own devising.
The soaked hats in the fields are like mushrooms,
and the careless whips return on the lightnings of time
to lie like snakes at the foot of the luxurious bed.
Stronger than poison is the venom of selfishness.
How shall the seasons forgive you and the songs of nightingales
and the glamour and splendour of roses, the humility of lilies –
how shall you correctly hear the notes of music
or scan with consonance the harmony of poems –
for all must be atoned for, the debts will some time be paid
and history will commemorate the coins that yourself have made.