Sorry to insist but
There is, if you don't know, a girl who
She hasn't seen the sea yet,
that she has not even pulled sixteen sheets of
a calendar,
I know that every human
each of us has in his house
poor us
a leak of its own
a doorknob that doesn't work
a chair with a broken leg
and a window glass wounded by stone.
And I also know,
because, like you, I live in
this South of America, that the rent
and the gas and the electricity and the grass, I know,
because we old people know for old
but we know more from poets, even so
sorry that I always walk with
the same ditty
I wish I could just see my daughters grow up
and write alone
happy poems for them.
I wish I saw only in the mirror of the moon
my own sadness,
or the woman I love
or the adorable silhouette of my beloved books,
but they get into my eyes
so many street children
my eyelids are heavy
as if they were made of wire and then
sorry for insisting
but while I write this poem
which will be read by twenty or thirty people
and while those people read it
sitting on the toilet
or drinking coffee in the kitchen,
there is a mother girl
who lives in the slides of Plaza Italia,
and I wish this were just my desecration
of the human imagination
but not.
When the bus turns around the square
We all see her curled up there,
through the window we see her
how we see the dolphins in Mundo Marino
do your thanks.