Could you contain my sighs of solitude
by harboring the anxiety in this fragile sea?
On your streets lies the tenderness, aging,
incandescent wind shelters and recalls
them in the distance
the flame anchored in your colors.

Habana,
Lucid, shadowed reminiscent garden
in an infinite insomnia
harnessing the dawn.
Throbbing uniquely,
uniquely understanding,
following the beat, freshness,
watercolor eyes of the city.
Giraldilla, proclamation, mystery,
chaste voice in a calm urge.
I consecrate your vitreaux,
sensing your baroque capitals,
Dusty, unraveled.
I'd like to talk:
Game, rainbow, love,
People, noise, cars;
Essays on flavors.
A captivated rumor,
your arbor dances a naked certainty:
A park, a cloud, summer, God.
The boundary hurts the clef,
the litany resorts to music,
when the stars nurse your elusive chant.

Far… blood calls for your passion,
Languishing, nobody edifies it,
in the absent dwelling of your sun, your moon.
The corner dwellers come to my mind,
the adjacent towns, trembling bedrooms.
I seek within you, dear city,
that home, The Cathedral,
that childhood, concrete flesh,
mother's kiss fading goodbye:
upholds my venerated memories.

Translated by Vanessa Cresevich

I wish to write my poetry,
in yesterday's words,
that unrequited poetry,
lost in time.

I wish to reawaken
days long gone,
days of unquenchable laughter,
unborn nostalgia.

I wish to lay my eyes on the sea again,
in my turmoil, its garden of dimming lights,
and always rise in the hours
whence I was once a child.

Metz, France, 2018
Translation from Spanish: Carl Tanne

Lately, I have been dreaming the same dream over and over.
Our lives are a poem in a lightless room.
My morning appeared like the sunrise breaking through the clouds of the darkness.
You are so close to me, you are the freedom of sunlight!
How I wish you could be with me all the time!
We miss each other so many times in my crossroads, you and I,
and yet I can only see your smile in my dream.

Translated by David Preston

Strange phosphorescence of old,
a tear precipitates your dress
and burns ******.

Remote, pristine.
Oh woman, you don’t exist on the branches of the sun!
Defenseless dances, almost pagan,
you burst turmoil in my brains
to drive me through your wild exile.

Asyllable that rules things maternal
on my definite, soft shoulder,
will liberate forever
a distant loss.

Bestow my pupil upon the secret
like fragile columns behind the valley,
it palpitates as it rises;
different such a scarce manner.

Shuddering from sugar and salt
the perishable breaks before me:
far-off minutes, light flesh.

Facing the instant, immutable land,
you determine your wandering as you go
over the light with no memory of the mother manger.

Translated by Martin Boyd