Translated from the Spanish by Amy Thomas

If love is not the sum of my every day,
continuous world that will bear no
caprice of return to an origin, nothing
above ever-reaching Being; if each

aurora longs for its own scarlet seed,
for what ungovernable chance does spring
rouse itself, fatally safe and secure
in its power to impose its light tomorrow?

Suddenly, underfoot, a desert
crackles in a flower’s spiky
petals. Waste void dryness, distance.

Meanwhile, through its fixed course, with no
gesture of return, as before,
a river giving its self to the sea.

Jorgé Guillen was a Spanish poet whose life work was a three-part book of poems, Nuestro Aire.  He was associated with the “Group of 27” poets with Federico Garcia Lorca.  After leaving Spain in 1936, he taught in the United States at both Harvard and Wellesley Colleges.

Amy Thomas is a writer living in Cambridge. Her poems have appeared in The Graham House Review and Provincetown Arts. (2000)