Against Death - Gonzalo Rojas

Gonzalo Rojas
Against Death

I pluck out my visions and pluck out my eyes each passing day.
I don’t want to see, I can’t! see men dying every day.
I’d rather be made of stone and dark
than endure the nausea of softening myself inside
and smiling left and right to prosper in my business.

I have no business other than to be here saying the truth
in the middle of the street to the four winds:
the truth of being alive, uniquely alive,
with my feet grounded and my skeleton free in this world.

What do we gain from leaping toward the sun in our machines
at the velocity of thought, the devil take it: what
do we gain on dying without any hope
of living outside of dark time?

God’s good for nothing. Nothing’s good for anything.
But I breathe, and eat, and even sleep
thinking that I have ten or twenty years before I go
face down, like them all, to sleep in six feet of cement down there.

I don’t cry, don’t weep. Everything has to be as it has to be,
but I cannot see coffins and more coffins
passing, passing, passing, passing every minute
full of something, stuffed with something, I cannot see
the blood in the coffins still steaming.

I touch this rose, I kiss its petals, I adore
life, I am not tired of loving women: I nourish myself
opening the world in them. But it’s all useless,
because I myself am a useless head
reading for lopping, not understanding what it means
to hope for another world out of this world.

They talk to me of God or talk of History. I laugh
that it’s so far to seek the explanation of the hunger
that devours me, the hunger to live like the sun
in the grace of air, eternally.


—Translated from the Spanish by John Oliver Simon