Household smoke pours into the dawn
its haulm savor;
and, gathering kindling, the shepherdess lets loose
a wild hallelujah!
Sepia and red.
Smoke from the kitchen, an epic
apertif on this sumptuous dawn.
The last fleeting star
drinks it, and, now high on its sweetness
—oh celestial all-night shepherd!—
falls asleep in a wisp of rosy hue.
There are certain lovely desires to eat lunch,
to drink from the arroyo, and to kid around!
To soar with the smoke beyond, on high;
or to surrender oneself to autumnal winds
in pursuit of some pure, holy Ruth
who offers us a spike of tenderness
under the Hebraic unction of wheat fields!
Sickle on sluggish shoulder,
his lively countenance bitter,
a young farmhand goes to Irichugo.
And in each yokelike arm
the iron juice agitates, throbbing,
and in a daily creative effort
sparkles, like a tragic diamond,
through the pores of a hand
no glove has ever byzantinized.
Under an archway formed by green alders
—oh fecund crossing of a man in rags!—
the massive profile of
this Incan Achilles of labor passes.
The young shepherdess crying
her yaravi into the dawn
gathers—oh poor Venus!—
fresh fragrant kindling
in her proud naked arms
sculpted of copper.
While a calf
chased by a dog
runs across the uncultivated
hill, offering to the flowering day
a Virgilian hymn in his cowbell!
In front of the hut
the Indian grandfather smokes;
and the pink highland dusk,
the primitive altar is scented
with tobacco fumes.
Thus from the fabulous entrails
of an epic huaco surges
a mythic aroma of bronzine lotuses,
the blue thread of severed breaths!