To go dying and singing. And to baptize the shadow
with a noble gladiator’s Babylonian blood.
And to sign off the golden carpet’s cuneiforms
with the nightingale’s quill and the blue ink of pain.
Life? Protean woman. To watch her slipping by
afraid in her veils, unfaithful, deceptive Judith;
to watch her from the wound, and to catch sight of her,
embedding a caprice of wax in a ruby.
Babylonian unfermented wine, Holofernes, without troops,
in the Christian tree I hung up my nest;
The redemptive vineyard denied love to my goblets;
Judith, treacherous life, cut down her body of a host.
Such a pagan feast. And to love her until death,
while the veins sow red pearls of evil;
and thus returning to the dust, hapless conqueror,
leaving thousands of eyes of blood on the dagger.
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Original: | ![]() This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1927. The author died in 1938, so this work is also in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 80 years or less. This work may also be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works. |
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Translation: | ![]() This work is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license, which allows free use, distribution, and creation of derivatives, so long as the license is unchanged and clearly noted, and the original author is attributed. |