Canons Poem by Francisco Urondo

For Jorge Enrique Adoum

1.

Careful with the heat
and the taste; with
hopes ill-
born Careful
with dreaming
because the moment has come.

2.

Clarity, owner
of life and premonition.

Clarity, rapid
and moving.

Brilliant tomb.

3.

They say gone
are the times
for love
and disdain.

They say gone
is color, is fluency;
gone, after
certainty and lies. Leaping.

4.

Scarcely arriving. Not even returning
a little: I always
will be going. Going
I watch, going I fall.

5.

I will take
this shared destiny.

I will know to touch it
and discover;

to bite
and break forgetting.

6.

A pair of gunshots in the dust clouds,
the sun parts: broken
streets, no orifice
for leaving; agnostics
and wanderers like crystal, strewn
in the dawn, bleeding
in the prayer, shaken
by the cockeyed Angelus. Settle in:
this is my best moment;
overseas, trusting
above every suspicion.

7.

Who hasn't passed
through that belt of hope
and prevention.

Through that equator
closer than sacrifice.