Antonio Roberval Miketen

For Simone
Poor little helpless baby chick,
leaning against the thrash can,
at ease in a coat of sheer luxury,
derived from a secret sable fur,
finer
than human skin.
High up, the clouds
are becoming the color
of the yellow of your softness.
The evening turned the morning late.
Your little eyes still open
want my hands
touching the back of your feathers.
They want me to be a small boy,
a small boy offering my innocence
to the little child that chirps inside you.
Sweet was your tameness
bent over a defeated rose,
while you rested your eternity
on a bouquet of roses, despised
because withered.
But under you each petal bleeded,
leaving a stain of wine
in the rniddle of your belly.
I then passed by,
you were already dead when I passed by
enamored of the sunset,
oblivious of the morning
that was rising in your little eyes.

I
The Song of João Moura

The bullfighter shouted in the center of the arena
and the horse danced in the depth of fear.

II

Picasso wanted to paint an arena,
full-sized, accurate,

with miuras with needle-sharp horns, carved
under the sleek black mountains.

On the canvas of the painter bad omens show:
in Guernica, did he paint the victory of the bull?

Consider that the arenas are human roses
ready to burst with the rage of the blood.

If Picassos dream were not so absurd,
Manolete, for sure, in his gala outfit

remembering Linares, would give himself to the bull:
would he repeat, once again, the faena of the rose?

III

Why do we trust the bull with the evidence of the wait,
on this chancy dove, innocent yet a beast?

IV

At the very moment when the body is dressed in gala
the heat of the shroud increases its nakednes.

V
Tragedy of "YIYO"

The mortal spike ripping the flesh
of the bullfighter makes sprout a brutal beauty.

VI
Will I see the day when the bull will find its luck
in the prime of the fake womb of the reckless veronica?

These hands of yours,
tiny little hands,
seaweeds in the silence,
bathed in light:
to what encounter,
tell me, daughter of mine,
to what fate
the fountain leads them?

A breeze ripples
huge leaves
in the depth
of my silence.

A wave floods
my conscience
that submerges
in the tense waters.

Memories shine
from a star
at no time traced.

Deep inside
roars the eternal scream
of earth covered by darkness.

Close to the waves of the sea of Vigo
I come to remember a friend.
Birds shed feathers at the horizon
and the feathers, water from a spring
in Vigo, on the seaweeds
of the friend announce his delay.
From beyond comes, light as feathers,
the pain I do not want to lament.
But the svagulls fill with mist
the depth of my sorrow,
when, on the shores of the sea of Vigo
I come to remember a friend.

I
Suddenly the silence turns into light,
as if strains of music, as if a subject in blue.

II
To find light within phrases,
the harmony, the sound of the universe,
so that we can hear the silence,
our own human silence,
so that we can, poet,
step on a page of blood.

III
Almost visible touchable pink of the poem,
an ogive, bewitched, on the shoulders of a dove.

IV
We forsake many things
because we grow towards the sun.
Amongst what we leave behind,
without piety, without remorse,
exists the innocence, the child;
like a sad little bird,
which sings in the bare light
the elegy of conscience.

V
What music, what music fades away in the distance,
ruled by the wings of the bird on the horizon?

VI
Write only what is brief,
in the short light of our life,
that never disturbs the children
and does not wet the margins of one’s vision.
So we need your notebooks,
to dive among the seaweeds,
within the deepest roots
that will light the green of the sea.

VII
Comes from the lucidness, the shine, the breast,
the slow puberty, within the center of scare.

VIII
The pupil of a gazelle
tears the rocks in the horizon.
Violet, the reflexion of the light,
to the east side of the sky,
where the deepest blue hides within the womb.

IX
In Autumn: the flicks of dry pulps;
on the remains of the life blood, the richness of the fruit.

X
In the silence which opens among the bell knell,
there is a dead little bird, to replace the child.

To yield silk for silk,
millimeter by millimeter,
the petal-like tissue
to the finest needles.

To weave, weave, weave,
weave the bull in pink,
without yielding the very terrain
of the matador.

In the smothness of the silk,
in the cutting edge of a glimpse,
to slide over the sword
the purity of fire.

To retain the fate of the bull,
to feel the vein on the fingertip,
to bring the leather close to the body
without a flip of fear.

With the thinness of the needle,
even if the blood chills,
retain the dark rose
on the petal-like skin.

In the bullfight in the round,
to spill blood and salt,
weaving a rose
of fatal red color.

Millimeter by millimeter,
to yield, yield, yieid,
to yield until the very minute
when feeling that death has come.