Blue, barbaric. Today soft trills
sing for you and in the literary workshops
the voice of the parrot gets thinner: moved
it sweetens the Great Glances, their confectioner's lesson.
On this side we pray for you kneeling before a wolf:
how beautiful a science is a room looking onto darkness
and man, that inconstant scholar,
is only a few steps that come along and go.
Today when teachers of letters have forgotten everything
the convicted know about you
and the vagabond who, at the risk of being smashed by cars,
stops the metaphor of this tread to pick up the miracle
of a leaf, without reaching an explanation,
today when the lift-men scarcely
rise above the others,
today when this mad substance appears smothered and defeated,
as it always was, as it is always going to be,
floating on the waters of numbers;
today when casinos have settled in your virgin forests
and disco music sounds in all thundering Africas ,
today when on 88th Street and Broadway a horrid so and so shows you
printed on the T-shirt, smiling at all the American Glory,
today when you, bound in leather with golden letters
are exhibited by dentists in their libraries
and the swift drug-dealers honour you their way, distributing poison
along the streets of the world,
today when walls fall and all posterities collapse,
today when History that old foe
laughs at us saying it doesn't exist,
as in your time the Devil repeated;
today when the soft muscles of the representatives
can throw thousands of sturdy foreigners,
if they want, into the sea,
today when the shy democracy proved
to be more effective than kings,
today when finally we all become good
and the pink, black, yellow and copper coloured
banquet of life lifts its radiant glass, beyond
the charitable groups attempting the sonnet,
through the bookshelves swept by dust and secretaries,
without typing or voice or hope or reason,
geographies go across two thick and powerful lights
surrounding the Earth like a ring.
Not because of the symbol but for the glance
you are like the plastic god which the scared one hangs from the wall
so that those Eyes follow him around the house. For us
the minimal ones, for us the few, for us the weak,
who only want to remain idle, your eyelids are
always open, disdainful brother,
Jesus Christ the Terrible,
today when it's shameful to be hungry
they keep on looking at your wild lanterns all the same.