THE PASSAGE OF TIME

How time rides upon the seconds,
the hours and the days.
How swiftly it gallops astride
the final lash
of a harsh storm wind.
How it strips away the lingering petals.
He was a little child yesterday,
and today his toys lie forgotten
in the senile attic of memory;
laughter and tears
wander through the echoes of twilight.

How emotions intertwine
in their fatal dripping.
At times,
an inner exile wounds and weeps,
wishing to suspend in space
the instant of ecstasy.
At other times,
piercing needles, blind arrows,
delay oblivion
with suffocating, monotonous slowness.

How its passing encloses the firmament
within clouds of abandonment.
Thickets of sunsets
darken familiar figures.
How time seduces
eyes still filled with tomorrows,
yet becomes the brutal agony approaching
with death riding upon its waves.
Sorrowful sand crosses the thresholds
of the present-past.

How the throbbing minutes fall
upon clenched hands
that cling to the edge of exile.
How the aging flesh suffers
from traces of vanished dreams.
Only the end
softens ancestral fears;
mystery is a current of expectation,
it calms the weary yawn of the spirit.

How, in the wagon of hours,
one reaches isolation.
How the winter cry
is a sounding whip that tears apart
vulnerable, fleeting matter.
The years travel toward their destiny
along silent sidereal paths,
and the turning of their rays
takes away the people we love most.

How are there names in the air without faces,
while grief renews its form?
Where is the smile of that child,
now an adult?
Why has no one mourned
his inevitable confinement
within relentless growing?
In an unknown dimension
the answers dwell.
And time passes, and passes, and passes, and passes...

Emma-Margarita R. A.-Valdés

Traductora: Vekas Rodica

 

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