Mi padre, el inmigrante: XIII / Vicente Gerbasi

My Father, the Immigrant: XIII
Vicente Gerbasi (Canoabo, 1913-Caracas, 1992)


Who calls me, who lights up leopard eyes
in the tamarind night?
The guitars quiet down to the mysterious blowing of death,
and the voices hush, and only the kids stay up late.
They are the inhabitants of the night,
when silence spreads throughout the stars,
and the domestic animal moves through the corridors,
and the nocturnal birds visit the village church,
where all the dead pass,
where bloodied saints live.
Through the shadows the headless horses run,
and the sands of the street reach the edges,
where fear gathers its animals of fire.
And it’s the night that shelters existence alone,
in the insomniac child, in the tired ox,
in the curve of the hills, in the radiances
of the rocks and the fern trees facing the stars,
in the mystery where I listen to you,
like a vast solitude of my heart.
My father, father of my shadows.
And of my poetry.


1945




Vicente Gerbasi, "Mi padre, el inmigrante," Antología poética (Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1990)