LOCKED WITH A TEAR

LOCKED WITH A TEAR

LUIS ROSALES

(Translated by Ralph Nelson and Rita Nelson)

As the stubborn ant carries its load counting on it to stay alive,

that's how I find you always locked around a tear,

one of your tears that you haven't cried yet,

that you don't want to cry,

that you can't cry because it's larger than your body,

because it's larger than your body

and you can't hold it back, just as the world can't hold back its night,

against it you rest, without crying over it, to stay together,

sleeping beside it sometimes open-eyed,

and you hold it in your arms, without possessing it, the way the rail holds a train,

and you protect it with your body from desecration,

so that the world, so tiny now, can't soak it up in its handkerchief.

Loved this one. It is not easy to achieve a level of poignancy with exaggeration. Rosales remarkably succeeds in it .

Luis Rosales was a renowned  Spanish poet and essayist Spanish of the generation of 1936 .Like Lorca, he was also a native of Granada. A poet praised by Neruda for his mastery of poetic techniques , he won the Cervantes Prize in 1982 for his entire literary work.