Can You? - Nicolás Guillén

Can you sell me the air as it slips through your fingers

As it slaps at your face and untidies your hair?

Perhaps you could sell me fivepennyworth of wind

or more, perhaps sell me a storm?

Perhaps the elegant air

you would sell me, that air

(not all of it) which trips around

your garden, from corolla to corolla

in your garden for the birds

tenpenceworth of elegant air.

The air spins and goes by

in a butterfly

Belongs to no-one, no-one.

Can you sell me the sky

the sky sometimes blue

or grey sometimes

a strip of your sky

the bit you think you bought with the trees

of your garden, as one buys the roof with the house?

Can you sell me a dollar

of sky, two miles

of sky, a slice, whatever you can

of your sky?

The sky is in the clouds

The clouds go by

Belong to no-one, no-one.

Can you sell me rain, the water

given to you by your tears, and moistening your tongue?

Can you sell me a dollar of water

from a spring, a gravid cloud

crinkly and soft as sheep

or perhaps rainwater up in the mountains

or the water from puddles

left for the dogs

or a stretch of sea, maybe a lake,

a hundred dollars of lake

Water falls, rolls on.

Water rolls on, goes by.

Belongs to no-one, no-one.

Can you sell me the earth, the deep

night of the roots, teeth

of dinosaurs and the lime

dispersed from distant skeletons?

Can you sell me forests lying buried, birds that are dead

fishes of stone, the sulphur

of volcanoes, a thousand million years

twisting their way up? Can you

sell me the earth, can you

sell me the earth, can you?

Your earth is mine

Trodden by everyone's feet

Belongs to no-one, no-one.

---

Nicolás Guillén (1902 - 1989) Cuba

Translated by Robert Marquez and David Arthur McMurray

Source: Barbados.org [From Man-making Words: Selected Poems Of Nicolás Guillén, Translated, Annotated, with an Introduction by Robert Marquez and David Arthur McMurray, Editorial de Arte y Literatura, La Habana, 1973]