María Ángela Valencia – Black messengers

María Ángela Valencia – LLM International Business Law Student. IE Business School.

Reading:

Black messengers by César Vallejo from the book Los heraldos negros, 1919.

There are in life such hard blows . . . I don’t know!
Blows seemingly from God’s wrath; as if before them
the undertow of all our sufferings
is embedded in our souls . . . I don’t know!

There are few; but are . . . opening dark furrows
in the fiercest of faces and the strongest of loins,
They are perhaps the colts of barbaric Attilas
or the dark heralds Death sends us.

They are the deep falls of the Christ of the soul,
of some adorable one that Destiny Blasphemes.
Those bloody blows are the crepitation
of some bread getting burned on us by the oven’s door

And the man . . . poor . . . poor!
He turns his eyes around, like
when patting calls us upon our shoulder;
he turns his crazed maddened eyes,

and all of life’s experiences become stagnant, like a puddle of guilt, in a daze.

There are such hard blows in life. I don’t know.