"Fire" Second State : Voice of Agony - Rogelio Sinán

- Give me your breeze, oh sea, your pure breeze to appease my voice and my inner core!
- Give me Lord your grace and your lungs to hold fast their air with my veins!
- My blood does not breathe!
- My pupils roam around at night!
- what stings tear my flesh!
- Lord, mercy!
  Why do you hide water from your rivers?
  Hasten all the rivers from your mountains!
- Open all the fountains of life!
- A drop of pure air Lord!
  One drop and no more!
- Just one drop for my bitter thirst!
- My shout is shattered!
  My voice bleeds in the shade, tortured by pricks of smoke.
- But the fire angels alone respond goading us all around.
- Only tongues of fire show their grimace from the room, the furnitures and bed sheets.
- A thousand guns of burning tears continue firing at us.
- My words become scorching cough!
  Mercy, Lord, mercy!
- Where do we flee from if death is what we swallow here, there and everywhere?
- We are shipwrecked in the mid sea of fire and tar.
- Burnt flesh, our breath is lost in the clouds.
- Which hope of origin will save us?
- Lord, if this be thy wish, take this holocaust of pain, shrieks and tears.
- Floating in the smoke our spirits approach you.
- Aleluya! Aleluya!

Ed acco a poco a poco un fummo farsi

verse di noi come la notte scuro.

Dante: Purgatorio.

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Rogelio Sinán, pseudonym of writer Bernardo Domínguez Alba (1902 - 1994) Panama
Translated by Minu Bakhshi and S.P. Ganguly
This is the second of three poems in the cycle "Fire"
Source: Rogelio Sinán An Approximation, Edited by Anil Dhingra, Centre of Spanish Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India