"Fire" Third State: Voice of Prayer - Rogelio Sinán

- How very late have begun to flow the rivers of dawn!
- What torrential music has seeped through all the wounds!
- How soft though delayed is this caress of the redeeming water!
- The flames have now mellowed their fury.
- And do not gnaw their teeth any more, nor roar.
- And the globe of heaven is about to explode of so much smoke.
- Only darkness and water.
- Water and darkness.
- Waterfalls, torrents, swelling seas.
- Our bodies, now cold, far from cries float in an unending ocean.
- They move ..., go round in a huge whirlwind.
- And what for, this water so huge? Oh, Lord, hold it back!
- Let death at least be held in esteem.
- But no one listens. Our bodies thrown around speechless, in the big whirlpool.
- They strike and cross, to be dragged again.
- Is there no hand to stop the source of this flow?
- Shall we girate eternally?
- Our shrieks will keep hanging and snapped from all children and mothers,
   and all the souls . Misery!
- Misery, oh, Lord!

E vidi in forma di rivera

fulvido di fulgore, intra due rive

dipinte di mirabil primavera.

Dante: Paradiso.

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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 third of three poems in the cycle "Fire"
Source: Rogelio Sinán An Approximation, Edited by Anil Dhingra, Centre of Spanish Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India