You won’t believe it, but I pray.

I go out at twilight

to S’Estància and all alone,

surrounded by animals,

I prune the olive trees, I write

until late and evening falls

sitting in my cabin

of stone, in the midst of candles

I converse with God who tries

to pacify fundamentalists,

sidesteps reactionaries,

fears the Taliban.

As in the beautiful poem

by Ernesto Cardenal

where he talks about Trappists

who rise in the night

and illuminate their cells

and open their psalters

and great antiphonaries

I light all my candles

circled by cats,

hens, lambs, tortoises,

and pray to God for my children.

I know it won’t save me,

plundered son of Menorca,

from the unrelenting passion

to read every book.

I do believe with all my heart

that it’s grasping at smoke

and in vain we chase the wind

of Literature.

I’m resigned to the fact

that I’ve already lived my five

banal minutes of fame

and now I have all the time

in the world to discover

who I am, where I’m from, where I’m bound.

Maybe it would be better

to go walking in the snow

full of life and kindness

without footprints or cap

like Walser, saying nothing.

After all, from this fire,

incurable torment,

nothing remains but a name

in a student’s textbook

a street named for you,

a statue with pigeons.

We write to live forever

and in the end we die.

To find the roots

of anguish, I’ve prodded

the wound that leads,

tortuous and blistering,

from our house to the door

of your Portuguese apartment.

You already know that

literary fame smells like

decay and has lost

all shame and decorum.

This is why, withdrawn

from the stink, I live and write

as if there is no world

and I’m not the last speaker

of a language already dead.

In the end I know that everything

will be nothing and there is no

other future than oblivion,

but I believe it’s been worth it,

in spite of the misery,

taking advantage of the pain

to make life into poetry.