|
By an alley lined with tumble-down shacks, | |
And street-lamps askew, half-sputtering, | |
Feebly glimmering on gutters choked with filth, and dogs | |
Scratching their mangy backs: | |
Half-naked children are running about, | 5 |
Women puff cigarettes in black doorways, | |
Crickets are crying. | |
Men slouch sullenly | |
Into the shadows. | |
Behind a hedge of cactus, | 10 |
The smell of a dead horse | |
Mingles with the smell of tamales frying. | |
|
And a girl in a black lace shawl | |
Sits in a rickety chair by the square of unglazed window, | |
And sees the explosion of the stars | 15 |
Fiercely poised on the velvet sky. | |
And she seems humming to herself: | |
“Stars, if I could reach you | |
(You are so very near that it seems as if I could reach you), | |
I would give you all to the Madonna’s image | 20 |
On the gray plastered altar behind the paper flowers, | |
So that Juan would come back to me, | |
And we could live again those lazy burning hours, | |
Forgetting the tap of my fan and my sharp words, | |
And I would only keep four of you— | 25 |
Those two blue-white ones overhead, | |
To put in my ears, | |
And those two orange ones yonder | |
To fasten on my shoe-buckles.” | |
|
A little further along the street | 30 |
A man squats stringing a brown guitar. | |
The smoke of his cigarette curls round his hair, | |
And he too is humming, but other words: | |
“Think not that at your window I wait. | |
New love is better, the old is turned to hate. | 35 |
Fate! Fate! All things pass away; | |
Life is forever, youth is but for a day. | |
Love again if you may | |
Before the golden moons are blown out of the sky | |
And the crickets die. | 40 |
Babylon and Samarkand | |
Are mud walls in a waste of sand.” |