XLI

--Lucía Estrada

I listen to a distant music, as of words that are going to be

pronounced, the last in a

language in extinction. The air brings its chapels, isolated, 

seeds of light in black

space. Inside its crystals, strong plants sing a silent song: it

talks about lost gods, fabulous

birds, vegetable, edenic beings, in search of a time resembling

emptiness. All will be said,

all will flow in the absence of mouths, all the words, those of

the beginning, those of death;

they will go over the motionless, the consummate, they open

the earth, they will separate

the waters, river against river, the fire will be surrounded, they

will sweep our bones that

hide the first garden, they will bring down the sarcophagus of

the ear and the tongue, and

still this voyage will be the beginning.

Queens of themselves, the words, we are only their mysterious

passage, not the region that

waits for them.