The laborer fist velvetizes
and outlines itself as a cross on every lip.
It’s feast day! The plow’s rhythm takes wing;
and every cowbell is a bronze precentor.
What’s crude is sharpened. Talk pouched …
In indigenous veins gleams
a yaraví of blood filtered
through pupils into nostalgias of sun.
Quenaing deep sighs, the Pallas,
as in rare century-old prints, enrosarize
a symbol in their gyrations.
On his throne the Apostle shines, then;
and he is, amid incense, tapers, and songs,
a modern sun-god for the peasant.
II.
The sad Indian is living it up.
The crowd heads toward the resplendent altar.
The eye of twilight desists
from watching the hamlet burned alive.
The shepherdess wears wool and sandals,
with pleats of candor in her finery;
and in her humbleness of sad and heroic wool,
her feral white heart is a tuft of flax.
Amid the music, Bengal lights,
an accordion sol-fas! A shopkeeper
shouts to the wind: “Nobody can match that!”
The floating sparks—lovely and charming—
are wheats of audacious gold sown by
the farmer in the skies and in the nebulae.
III.
Daybreak. The chicha finally explodes
into sobs, lust, fistfights;
amid the odors of urine and pepper
a wandering drunk traces a thousand scrawls.
“Tomorrow when I go away …” a rural
Romeo bewails, singing at times.
Now there is early-riser soup for sale;
and an aperitive sound of clinking plates.
Three women go by … an urchin whistles … Distantly
the river flows along drunkenly, singing and weeping
prehistories of water, olden times.
And as a caja from Tayanga sounds,
as if initiating a blue huaino, Dawn
tucks up her saffron-colored calves.