Walt Whitman, by William Ospina.

"I don´t deplore ignoring what happened next between
the States,
in other or in many centuries, what came next
after swift railroads,
after the amazing telegraphs and the cosmic
death of Lincoln.
Something shall have happened, faster ships
will replace those,
huge reapers would have substituted men
in the harvest of continental cornfields,
and men that way freed of their labour shall
have been able to devote to live freely
and to sing idler songs
(that´s, at least, my hope)
or shall have been thrown, commanded by obscene bosses, to
war in remote ricefields
(there will always be place for fright
to win).

Ignoring it does not afflict me. I will ignore so much
I couldn´t count it:
the future is as numberless as the most curdled
and clear-cut sky in winter.
I don´t dedicate to melancholic counting of
what I leave:
if something truly exists, it was before me,
and will last longer,
I bearly stroked it by the way like a handful
of grass.

What came after the inmense rotatories, after the
crowded towers?
Did they do better ships, with bolder sails
and more complex masts?
And how did my relatives ended their lives?
Perhaps the small and blonde niece got to be
a severe old woman, abandoned by her seven children,
and that boy I loved became a great Magistrate, or
a great criminal, or a dementic genius...
Always something unpredictable, something that anguish
happily solved,
or that awfuly turned over what was radiantly
progressing.

Ignoring what will happen with my loved republic
does not afflict me.
Every end is melancholic, but is sorrounded by
splendid beginnings,
and it is beautiful to see the great oak rolling
under the axe of the scrapping
if around young oaks rise.

Everything that´s loved will follow its faith, every thing
will stay with it´s rust of chances,
all those who I loved shall start surrending gently to the
arms of the formless,
I know that fading is the condition for the sun to
fly again from hands of night.

Parents, blurry parents of my parents, supreme
bonfire of generations which alive blood
runs through my veins,
It wasn´t given to them forsee the future, always amazing
and new, nor to harvest what they planted.

Swifter vehicles, miraculous ways of sending
messages from distance,
unspoiled jungles conquered, the seabeds,
the planets, everything is well set for men´s
sons advance in ther formidable adventure.

And it could well be that wars or plagues reduced
this vasts republic again into villages,
or that a curse sealled for ever books and
tumbs
and memory of past days was forbidden.
Nothing would be lost, any way,
wine is magnificent, but water is better, it make us drunk
in a more mystical way,
it won´t reveal that other that hides in me, it reveals
myself.

To you, in many centuries, all I can tell you is that nothing
was given to us differently,
you could see yourself in every bush and river, in the dizzy
fly of the bee.
What I name is eternal.
Nothing will be better than it has been.

The parties at the pink pavilions where with
savage flowers and incomprehensible liquors the
audacious crews are shipped off.
(heading to Mars and Venus, their grandchildren will
go across Andromeda)
aren´t less joyful and solemn that those celebrations at
asirian tents (I´m looking at them) before
battle.
And while beer remains beer it will taste the same
at Moon´s pubs
or at sunny Mesopotamian tables.

There aren´t centuries, nor millenia, nor ages for twinkling
stars:
every glint is a beginning, every blink an
agony,
and the silver bands in which future ships will  travel
aren´t what´s most amazing,
nor it is the tower they rose at Babel, next to
the big river,
it is this summer noon, the little window
upon which universe waves smash,
and this blind that sections light,
and this magical voices that cross the lobbies,
and this red stair of massif shadows that joins
every plane of the world"
-William Ospina, El país del viento (The wind country).